Gravity PDF setup guide

Here is a quick guide on how to setup our Gravity PDF integration add-on (still in beta) and generate beautiful charts inside the PDF attached in email notifications. You can quickly test it here.

0 – Install PhantomJS on your server

At the moment, it is not possible to embed PhantomJS inside the plugin, so you have to make sure it is installed on your server. We are working hard to make this step useless in a near futur. For instance, install PhantomJS on Ubuntu 16.

1 – Install plugins

Make sure you have installed and activated both plugins:

• Gravity PDF plugin
• download our MaxiCharts integration for free.

MaxiCharts Gravity PDF add-on is quite a big zip file, and most web servers configurations won’t let you upload such a big file through your WordPress backend plugin upload form. You will then need either to

• increase upload_max_filesize value inside php.ini file, if you have access to it
• use a dedicated plugin to allow upload of very big plugins
• else you need to upload this zip file manually using an FTP client (we recommand free FileZilla client) to the /wp-content/plugins directory on your web server.
  1. Unzip the plugin files.
  2. All plugins downloaded from the Plugin Directory are in the Zip format. Most operating systems (Windows, Mac, and so on) have built-in tools to open Zip files. After opening the Zip file, extract the directory contained inside the Zip file and put it in a directory on your computer that is easily accessible.
  3. Connect to your site’s server using FTP.
  4. If you have any difficulty connecting to your server, contact your hosting provider and ask for assistance in connecting to your server via FTP.
  5. Navigate to the wp-content folder within the WordPress installation for your website or blog.
  6. The location of your WordPress installation can differ with every hosting provider. Make sure that you know the location before you proceed.
  7. Navigate to the /wp-content/plugins directory.
  8. First, navigate to wp-content. Inside this directory are the plugins and themes directories along with a few others. Navigate to the plugins directory. It is inside this directory that all plugins reside.
  9. Upload the plugin folder to the /wp-content/plugins directory on your web server. This may take a while as the plugin contains quite a lot of files
  10. The plugin folder, named for the plugin (for example, the folder is /maxicharts-pdf-add-on here) contains all the files for that plugin.
  11. Go to the Dashboard’s Plugins page and you see the new plugin listed. If a mistake is made, delete all the newly uploaded files and begin again.
  12. Activate the plugin

Make sure the whole plugin directory is owned by the web server user, for example with Apache on Ubuntu:
chown -R www-data:www-data maxicharts-pdf-add-on/
Make also sure that casperjs is executable by launching the command:
chmod +x maxicharts-pdf-add-on/node_modules/casperjs/bin/*

2 – Create a Gravity form or modify an existing one

3 – Insert a hidden (or text) field and set its value to a MaxiCharts shortcode

What’s great is that you can insert any MaxiCharts shortcode, even one charting another form entries 🙂

Create field

Set shortcode as Default Value

4 – Enable at least one notification

in order for the plugin to attach the PDF file of the form with the chart you need

5 – Enable at least one PDF

And do not forget to associate it with the notification of your choice. See Gravity PDF documentation for further explanations.

That’s all!

Include your Gravity form as you would for any form in any post or page and you are ready to go !