All posts filed under: Contract generation

A new era in document automation with WordPress

Published by Richard Best

Like so many others, I’ve seen enough to be convinced that AI is here to stay, that it will get exponentially more powerful over time, and that the technology will transform many areas of work. Of course, document automation has been making inroads into the drafting of many kinds of documents for a long time. The value of automation, and the efficiencies and cost savings it can bring, are undeniable. Now that AI is on our doorstop and bashing down the door, what does this mean for orthodox document automation? With orthodox document automation, typically we create docx templates with ‘direct replacement’ merge tags and ‘conditional content’ merge tags that are processed to produce a customised document when someone fills out a form or answers a questionnaire. Another way of doing it is to convert html output to a docx file. In each case, the process (when done properly) ensures consistent and predictable outputs. With AI, the question becomes whether this tried and true method will be overtaken. My current view is that, at the …

Document automation is coming to a WordPress installation near you

Published by Richard Best

WordPress and Gravity Forms are both awesome. But, for a long time, there’s been a gap in what the ecosystem can do in the realm of document automation. This has been the case because either: you had to pipe your data to or otherwise rely on third party hosted services; or your options were limited to PDF output, or document output that did not accommodate conditional content. Solutions that require you to pipe your data to or otherwise rely on third party hosted services can result in a loss of control over your data, as well as potentially expensive monthly or annual fees. Solutions that limit you to PDF output restrict what you or your clients or customers can do with the generated output. And solutions that enable output to .doc or .docx formats but do not support conditional content are just too limited for any use case where chunks of content need to be included or excluded depending on what a person enters into a form. GravityMerge is changing all that, and it’s doing …

Attention WordPress course creators – mad cyber week deal on The 5-Step Legal Plan for Online Course Creators

Published by Richard Best

I suspect many of us, myself included, are now suffering from Black Friday to Cyber Monday fatigue. So I’ll keep this brief. For a very limited time, I’m offering full access to The 5-Step Legal Plan for Online Course Creators for the madly discounted price of $29. That’s a whopping 66% off the normal price. The course helps you to protect your course content, avoid being sued, comply with important laws, and keep what you earn in your pocket, in under 90 minutes! This includes walking you through quick and automated creation of your own copyright statement, disclaimer, terms of use, and privacy statement. Oh, and you’ll get all 6 of our ebooks too, which cover protecting your course content, using others’ content safely, licensing content to get promotion, mastering your email marketing, having a privacy statement, and shielding yourself from lawsuits. This deal will never be repeated again, so be quick. There’s never been a better time or place for course creators to get their legal house in order. GET THE DEAL HERE AND NOW, before it …

Discouraging public redistribution of commercial themes and plugins – poll results

Published by Richard Best

Background Back on 4 August of this year, I published a post called Theme and plugin shops – Discouraging public redistribution – User poll.  The poll that was included in the post sought people’s views on the reselling of commercial themes and plugins. It did this because people’s views on this issue are relevant to the inclusion of a contractual mechanism I’d proposed for theme/plugin shop terms of use. The contractual mechanism I’d proposed would seek to discourage purchasers of a commercial theme or plugin from making the theme or plugin available on a website for download by others (whether for free or a charge), even when the theme or plugin is 100% GPL-licensed. The proposed term would say that, if a customer decides to make your commercial theme or plugin available on a website for download by others, you may exercise a right to deactivate their access keys (if that’s how you’ve set things up) and to terminate their access to support and updates. I explained why, in my view, this sort of clause …

How to build a contract generator with WordPress and Gravity Forms

Published by Richard Best

Background and introduction I purchased a Gravity Forms developers licence back in October 2009. It was one of the best WordPress-related purchases I’ve ever made, as the forms plugin has gone from strength to strength over the years and is now so polished, with so many useful add-ons, that it can truly convert WordPress into an app machine of sorts. In the intervening five years, I’ve put Gravity Forms to all manner of uses, including making a number of contract and licence generation tools with it. Among other things, I’ve used it to build: a website terms of use, mutual confidentiality agreement and privacy policy generator (see ubuildcontracts.com); a Creative Commons licence chooser that built upon the code output of the Creative Commons licence chooser by adding government-specific elements to the code to reflect guidance in the New Zealand Government Open and Accessing Licensing framework (known as NZGOAL) (I’ve since taken this licence generator down); and a generator that enables one to build a fully populated instance of a Government Model Contract for Services, with …