Gravity Forms
+ Equipment Loans & Returns

Schools, libraries, IT teams, clubs and rental desks lend things every day and need to know who has what, when it is due back and what is late. The Gravity Forms Equipment Loans & Returns add-on turns a Gravity Forms form into a loan request form and gives your staff a small lending desk inside WordPress.

Keep an item catalogue under Forms → Equipment Loans: name, code, category, a stock count or one serial number per unit, a longest loan per item, and add items one by one or import a CSV. Map up to three item fields on any form, filled from the catalogue, with units, a start date and a due date that the add-on sets from a fixed loan length or that the borrower chooses, a booking window, the borrower’s name and e-mail and a limit per borrower.

As soon as the dates are chosen, the form shows how many units are free for every day of the loan and greys out what is not available. On submit the server checks everything again under a lock and reserves the units, so two people can never book the last one, and the due date cannot be changed in the browser. Staff check items out (serial numbers picked) and in (condition, note, photo, lost units taken out of stock) from the Loans page with active, overdue, reserved and returned views and a CSV download. Due-soon and overdue reminders, check-out and return messages are Gravity Forms notifications sent by a daily job, and reservations nobody collects are released. A history per item and per borrower, an entry box, {loan:items}, {loan:due} and {loan:status} merge tags and export columns complete it. Everything runs on your own server: no outside connection. For Gravity Forms 2.9 and newer.

The items and the loans are stored in two tables in your WordPress database. When a borrower picks the dates, the form asks your server how many units of each item are free on every day of that period and shows the number next to each item. When the form is submitted, the add-on checks the dates, the item, the units, the borrower limit and the free stock again on your server, one request at a time under a lock, and holds the units; the new entry turns the hold into a reservation. For a fixed loan length the due date is always set by the server. Staff check items out and in from the Loans page, and a daily WordPress job sends the due-soon and overdue notifications and releases reservations nobody collected. Everything happens on your own server — the add-on makes no outside HTTP request beyond the licence and update checks.