Gravity Forms
+ Virtual Queue & Now Serving

A service desk, a clinic reception or a town hall counter often has one problem at busy times: a crowded waiting area where nobody knows how long they will wait, and staff who shout the next name across the room. The Gravity Forms Virtual Queue & Now Serving add-on turns any Gravity Forms form into a take-a-number system on your own site. People scan a QR code at the door with their phone camera, fill in a short form and get a ticket number such as C-014.

Their phone then shows a live status page: the ticket, how many people are ahead, an estimated wait based on the real pace of the last calls, and the numbers being served right now. They can wait in a café nearby, get an e-mail when their turn is near and another when they are called, or leave the queue with one tap. Staff use a simple call-next screen per counter to call, recall, mark no-shows, serve and transfer someone to another service, and a large now-serving display on a TV in the waiting area shows the number at each counter, the last called numbers and an optional chime.

Each service has its own counters, opening hours, ticket prefix, daily ticket limit and a fresh numbering every day. Ticket numbers are issued by the database itself, so two people who take a number at exactly the same moment never get the same number and no number is skipped. Statistics, a CSV export and an activity log show waits, people served and no-shows. Everything runs on your own server with no outside service. For Gravity Forms 2.9 and newer.

When someone submits a form with queue tickets switched on, the add-on checks that the chosen service is open and then asks the database for the next number of the day for that service. A unique key on the service, the day and the number means two submissions can never store the same number; if two arrive at the same moment, one simply takes the next number, so the day's numbers stay 1, 2, 3 without gaps, and the daily limit is checked against the number itself. The ticket is linked to the Gravity Forms entry, and the confirmation shows the ticket with a signed link to its status page. The status page and the TV display ask your server for news every few seconds with one small request, so there is no outside push service. When staff call the next person, the ticket is claimed in one database step, so two counters can never call the same person; the add-on then sends the form's "called" notifications and the "turn is near" notifications to people who have moved within reach, once per ticket. An hourly job closes yesterday's open tickets and runs the data retention clean-up. The add-on makes no outside HTTP request beyond the licence and update checks.