Gravity Forms
+ Class Attendance Register

Sports clubs, schools, after-school clubs, dance and music schools, youth groups and adult classes already take their registrations with Gravity Forms. When the season starts, somebody still has to keep a register: who came to each session, who was late, who was away and why. Paper sheets get lost, spreadsheets go out of date as soon as a new child joins, and nobody notices that a member has quietly stopped coming. The Gravity Forms Class Attendance Register add-on turns your registration entries into class registers.

A class is your registration form plus a filter, for example the field Class equals Under 9s Football. Its roster follows the entries: new registrations join, and registrations that are withdrawn, trashed or marked as spam drop off, while their attendance history is kept. Add sessions one at a time or as a weekly schedule on the days you choose between two dates, skip holidays, and name the leaders. Leaders open the roll page on their phone, tap Present, Absent, Late or Excused for each person, add a note, use Mark all present and save; every later change is kept in a change log.

When someone is marked absent, the add-on can send a Gravity Forms notification to the contact on the registration, with a signed link to give a reason that is stored on the attendance record. The organiser gets an alert after a number of absences in a row. Reports show attendance rates per person, class and month with CSV export, and the {attendance:rate} and {attendance:present} merge tags bring the numbers into notifications and certificates. Screens are role-restricted, links never contain names or e-mail addresses, and everything runs on your own server.

The add-on keeps its own small tables for classes, rosters, sessions, attendance marks and the change log, next to your Gravity Forms entries. A class reads the active entries of its registration form and keeps those that match its filter; the roster is refreshed when an entry is added, edited, trashed, restored or marked as spam, and whenever a class screen or a roll opens. A weekly schedule is turned into one session per chosen weekday between the two dates, minus the skipped dates, and a session that already exists is never added twice. The roll page is a normal WordPress page with the [gf_class_attendance] shortcode: it shows names only to a logged-in manager or to a leader of that class, is never cached or indexed, and every save checks a WordPress nonce and the leader’s access again. When a person is marked absent, the add-on sends the notifications of your registration form that use the event “Class attendance: marked absent”, once per absence. The reason link carries only the number of the attendance record and an HMAC signature, so it contains no name or e-mail address and cannot be changed to reach another record. Rates use a simple rule you can explain to parents and members: Present and Late count as attended, Absent as missed, Excused is left out, and a class rate pools every mark. Everything happens on your own server — the add-on makes no outside HTTP request beyond the licence and update checks.