Gravity Forms
+ Form Locker

Modern WordPress website administrators, digital agencies, and enterprise organizations frequently manage forms that contain sensitive questions, proprietary pricing calculators, executive intake surveys, or confidential NDA submissions. Publishing these forms openly on public pages invites automated crawler scraping, unwanted spam submissions, and unauthorized data harvesting. Conversely, forcing visitors to register a full WordPress user account creates high user friction, reduces submission conversion rates, and adds substantial user management overhead.

The Gravity Forms Form Locker Add-on solves this architectural dilemma by introducing clean, per-form password gating. Instead of restricting an entire page or managing complex user roles, administrators can lock specific Gravity Forms individually. When an unauthenticated visitor loads a page containing a locked form, the add-on hooks directly into gform_get_form_filter to intercept the rendering pipeline. The actual form structure, input fields, and sensitive options are completely omitted from the HTML source, rendering a clean, branded password challenge container in its place.

Security is maintained through an asynchronous AJAX authentication loop. When the user enters their access key, the frontend script dispatches a secure request to the WordPress formlocker_verify_password_ajax endpoint. The server validates the submitted string against the form's encrypted configuration. Upon successful verification, the system generates a secure, hashed cookie (flk_verified_formid_{form_id}) with an admin-configured expiration timestamp (calculated dynamically across minutes, hours, days, or months). The form is then instantly unlocked and rendered in real time without triggering an disruptive full-page browser refresh.

Because validation occurs at the server hook layer rather than merely hiding fields with frontend CSS or JavaScript, tech-savvy users cannot bypass the restriction using browser Developer Tools. Unverified POST submissions are rejected outright. This provides rock-solid security for VIP client portals, wholesale supplier order desks, employee HR evaluations, and private consultation forms while maintaining an elegant, frictionless user experience.

The Form Locker Add-on operates on an intelligent server-side interception and cryptographic session verification pipeline designed for maximum performance and zero DOM leaks.

Technical Architecture Pipeline