Gravity Forms
+ Lost & Found Register

Schools, hotels, gyms, venues, events and offices collect lost property every day, and every item needs the same three things: a safe place in a list, a way for the owner to find it, and proof that the right person took it home. The Gravity Forms Lost & Found Register add-on turns your Gravity Forms forms into a lost and found desk with a private register inside WordPress.

Staff use a found item form to record the category, colour, where and when it was found, a private description, the storage place and a photo. The server gives every item a reference and a keep-until date, checks that the photo is a real image and removes its location and camera data. Visitors use a lost report form, and the add-on compares each report with the items you hold and suggests the best matches by category, colour, dates, place and key words. A public found items list on any page shows only the reference, category, colour, area and date; descriptions, storage places, finders and photos stay private.

Owners press Claim this item, answer your ownership questions and wait for a check. Staff see the answers side by side with the private details and photo, with a hint of how many key words match, then approve or refuse with a note. Only one claim per item can be approved. The hand-over record keeps who collected it, the ID check, the staff member and the time. After the number of days you choose, a daily job sends one notification per item so you can mark it disposed of or donated. Notification events, {lostfound:ref} and {lostfound:status} merge tags, entry columns, CSV downloads and personal data export and erase complete it. Everything runs on your own server: no outside connection. For Gravity Forms 2.9 and newer.

The register, the lost reports and the claims are stored in two tables in your WordPress database. When staff save a found item, the server checks the category, the date and the photo, removes the photo metadata and writes the reference and the keep-until date into the entry. When a visitor sends a lost report, the server scores every held item against it and keeps the best matches; a new found item is also compared with the open reports. The public list reads only the reference, category, colour, area and date of held items. A claim is accepted only for an item that is on the list right now, and every staff action is checked for the right permission and a security token, and changes the record only while it is still in the expected state. A daily WordPress job sends the keep-until notification once per item. Everything happens on your own server — the add-on makes no outside HTTP request beyond the licence and update checks.