# Welcome to GravityOps Forum

Welcome to GravityOps Forum, the most flexible way to turn your Gravity Forms entries and forms into a community discussion space.

With GravityOps Forum, you can leverage the power and familiarity of Gravity Forms to build a fully functional forum—complete with boards, forums, topics, and replies—while keeping all your data in the form of Gravity Forms entries.

## How it Works

GravityOps Forum acts as a management layer over your Gravity Forms. Instead of just listing entries in the back-end, it organizes them into a hierarchical structure:

- **Boards:** High-level categories (e.g., "Customer Support," "General Discussions").
- **Forums:** Specific discussion areas within a board (e.g., "Feature Requests," "Bug Reports").
- **Topics:** Individual discussion threads created by users submitting a Gravity Form.
- **Replies:** Comments and follow-ups on topics, created by submitting another Gravity Form.

## Key Features

- **Standard Gravity Forms Integration:** Use any field types, conditional logic, and add-ons within your topic and reply forms.
- **Hierarchical Structure:** Organize your community with boards and nested sub-forums.
- **Status Visibility:** Control whether boards and forums are Active, Private, Hidden, or Draft.
- **Powerful Access Controls:** Define exactly who can view, post, and moderate each forum based on WordPress user roles.
- **Author & Moderator Tools:** Allow users to edit or delete their own posts, and moderators to manage the entire community.
- **Canonical Data Storage:** All forum content is stored as Gravity Forms entries, making it compatible with existing workflows, notifications, and export tools.
- **Shortcode-based Front-end:** Easily display your forum on any page or post using simple shortcodes.

## Getting Started

To begin, you'll need at least one Gravity Form to handle Topic submissions and one to handle Replies. Once your forms are ready, you can start mapping them to your forum structure.

For a step-by-step guide, review the Quick Setup Checklist in this documentation set.
