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Contact Form Plugins for WordPress

One of the things most of the how-to and MMO blogs stresses is the necessity of having a contact form. It is not quite as necessary for a personal blog, although it could be useful, but for those serious about making money, a way for people to contact you besides commenting on a post is absolutely required. But how to enable that contact?

The easiest way is to put your email address someplace where it is easily seen. A text widget on the sidebar is visible, on all your pages and posts, and easily recognized by anyone that has used the web for more than a couple of days. But it is also ripe for scraping by spammers, can cause you to miss messages in your other email or to an overenthusiastic spam filter, and is not as professional in appearance as you might want. Fortunately there are plugins available to handle your contact needs.

Simple Contact Forms

The Tiny Contact Form is not talking about the size of actual form, but the size of the plugin. It is hard to see how it could be any easier to use. Install it, paste the shortcode on the page or post you want to use for contacts, and put your email address into the field on the setup page (This is in fact the entire setup page. One field for your email.) Bingo, you have a contact page. Or you can use the widget to stick the form into your sidebar, so it is always available to your visitors.

Not to say that it is perfect. The widget adds the form to your sidebar, but you need to do some css editing to make it fit correctly. There is also no attempt at catching spammers. But it is a very new plugin, very easy to use, and worth looking at if you want something basic and fast.

The SimpleModal Contact Form creates a very nice looking contact form that shows up over the current page like Lightbox does pictures. But it is mostly useful as an addition for most people, since you need to have a contact page available anyway for visitors that do not have javascript enabled. As an addition, it works nicely, your visitors can send you their remarks then go right back to the same place they were without reloading pages.

Unfortunately, there are things about the plugin that are not quite so nice. The options for the form are limited for something so hard to install. In order to change the look of the form, you need to directly edit the css on the plugins stylesheet, which is not the easiest to figure out. The biggest problem with the plugin is possible conflicts with other plugins using the same progamming systems. (This is not the fault of the author, the problem is caused by having thousands of people creating thousands of plugins, with no coordination.) Nice looking, lots of potential, but not really something I would select for ease of use or installation.

Enhanced WP-ContactForm is almost as easy to install as the Tiny Contact Form. You just need to fill the input fields on the Setting page, although the only one that you have to make any changes to is your email address, choose your language (English, French, or Dutch), and paste the shortcode in the location you want the form. It includes a check for malicious code and has a spam checker, along with allowing personalized messages for various results.

While it is usable right at installation, it does not look that good. You really need to do some css styling to make it look better. The author has a sample on his support page, so modifying it would not be too difficult if you are comfortable with CSS, but would be nice if it was included somewhere in the plugin.

Multiple Forms

Form Builder allows you to build simple forms fairly easily. It’s latest update added some nice features, including CAPTCHA, the option to save submitted forms in your MySQL sb, and a pre-populated form when you create one, rather than having to do it all from scratch. The first is obviously useful these days, the third means it is much more plug and play then before. There is a nice selection of options available for your forms, drop down menus, radio buttons, and 2 sizes of comment boxes, as well as 2 spam blocking methods, including the new CAPTCHA.  And the 2 methods of placing forms, shortcodes or dropdown menu, give it some nice flexibility in that area.

There is an Auto-Responder capability in the plugin, but you have to set it up. The documentation on the plugin home is a real help in that. The styling is very basic, although you can use custom CSS on an additional stylesheet to make any changes you want. This can be daunting if you are not very familiar with CSS, but it is optional. And the addition of the pre-populated fields when a new form is created has helped a great deal in ease of use. This is a solid plugin, which does what it says it will.

Contact Form 7 is an easily installed, moderately flexible contact form plugin. You generate tags on the option page, then paste those tags into the form area of the option page in the order you want them. You can style the forms in a couple of ways, either in the form area or by assigning class and id names in the tags when you create them. The second method gives you much more precise control over what your form looks like. Although like Formbuilder, some familiarity with CSS is required.

It has a nice variety of options available for generating tags, including CAPTCHA options, radio buttons, checkboxes, and drop down menus. It also integrates with Akismet to check for spam, and has customizable messages for various results. While more limited than cforms II, Contact Form 7 is much easier to use. It is much more plug and play, and on most blogs will need little to no styling.

cforms II is a popular contact form plugin. It is extremely versatile, allowing you to do anything from quickly creating a page with a simple message box to designing multi-page forms with a large amount of required information. It also allows you to replace and customize your comment box and is compatible with CommentLuv, Subscribe to Comment and WP Ajax Edit Comments. Add in CAPTCHA, CSS styling, and dynamic form capability and you pretty much have everything you could possibly want in a form builder.

But this comes with a price. All of the possibilities available in cforms means you also have a huge amount of complexity. The documentation is excellent, giving examples and leading you through the options to help you create exactly what you want. But it still takes quite a bit of work to create, especially if you want to modify the CSS to fit your theme. You can easily use one of the default forms and CSS styles provided to just drop into your blog. But if you are going to do that, why pick such a high powered plugin? If you do have the need for more than a simple contact form, or think you will in the future, this is probably the way to go.

Final Thoughts

There was one other plugin I did not try out. The simpleContact plugin is only available in German, so there was no way for me to set it up. I looked at it and got an error, but that could have been caused by my not doing something necessary because I couldn’t read the instructions.

So there are a lot of ways out there to help your readers contact you. The range of available plugins, from the simple Tiny Contact Form to the powerhouse cforms II, means you can easily find one that suits both your programming abilities and your needs.

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6 Responses to Contact Form Plugins for WordPress

  1. Eric Martin says:

    Tom,

    I wanted to thank you for your write-up on SimpleModal Contact Form. Unfortunately, I don’t receive much feedback, so it was nice to read some honest, constructive, criticism.

    There is a big problem in the WordPress community with understanding how to property use scripts – I’ve made every effort to follow the standards, but that doesn’t prevent issues caused by others (as you mentioned).

    The options are definitely limited – something that was originally done to simplify the animation effects. There are a number of improvements I would like to make and I’d love to hear any additional input you might have.

    As for changing the look and feel…what other ways do you have in mind? Would you want to see some more style options in the admin section?

    Again, I appreciate your feedback and look forward to hearing from you.

    -Eric

    • Tom B. says:

      Eric,

      I am glad you liked the write up. I certainly know what you mean about issues caused by other plugins. On an earlier post I mentioned 3 I can’t run at the same time, because it messes with my dashboard. On my test site, I can run all of them, which means it is a fourth plugin that is messing up those 3. Still haven’t figured out which one.

      I did not really think that the options you offer are too limited. You went with a simple contact form, and the options to CC the sender, along with behind the scenes user information that can be sent, are fairly nice.

      The problem is with the installation. Having to hack a php file can be intimidating for non-programmers. I have been messing around with html and CSS for over a decade, but php is mostly a mystery to me and I try to avoid hacking the files when possible. Even just doing a copy & paste, I could end up messing up another function. Having to do that, and still have another contact form available in case the reader doesn’t allow javascript, is a lot of trouble for a simple form, even a nice looking one like yours.

      I have to admit, I do not know what options you have to handle this. Giving people the option to place it by hacking is good, but something that the technophobe can do easily like placing a widget is very nice. I don’t know enough about php to give a realistic idea of what is possible.

      As for the look, you can see I have blue for a background color on my site. I like it, and tend to use it for a lot of things. By digging through your stylesheet and experimenting, I could make some changes to the colors, but the header and footer gifs are black, so I would be stuck with that unless I made my own and uploaded them. And because you made provisions for readers changing sizes of your text and box (Nicely done, I hate doing that with CSS.) it is not easy digging through the stylesheet.

      If you wanted to give your users options for changing that kind of thing easily, I see a couple of options. You could set up a couple of different color boxes, the black you have now and one in a lighter color, then put a dropdown menu on the option page so the user can choose whichever works better for their theme. The cforms II plugin does something like this with their CSS. You could start with a couple, then add in more as you do updates of the plugin until you have a nice library of them for the user.

      Or you could put input boxes on the option page where they can place the color code they want, and drop those values into the stylesheet. That is how the theme designer for this theme did the background and border colors. This method would mean either dropping the header and footer gifs or giving the user the choice between a couple of colors to drop in.

      I hope I have explained what I mean clearly and it is of some help. Frankly, the installation is the biggest stumbling block. If you could figure out a way to make that more painless, it would really add to its value.

      Let me know if you want to know anything else.

      • Eric Martin says:

        Thanks again for the great feedback!

        I’m curious what “hacking” you were having to do in PHP? Did you want additional or different form elements? Are you talking about having to add the CSS class or the smcf() function?

        I agree about the non-JS users. My eventual plan is to have SMCF handle both situations. Just have to find the time 😉

        I’d also like to make the styling easier and have considered using something like ThemeRoller.

    • Tom B. says:

      I figure any time I have to open up a php file on my theme, it qualifies as hacking the theme. I have done it a few times on the theme I am using here, follow the instructions Drew, the designer, gave, but I do not like doing it, because it is so easy to mess things up. I have a fear of messing up a function call and screwing my database. Probably completely irrational, but still there. And I am comfortable with html and css. There are people out there who find those a mystery. How do you thing they feel about dealing with php? Even something as easy as yours, just pasting the function in the sidebar, what if I put it inside another function by accident? Will it break the database? Or the entire page? Or just the sidebar? Or will nothing break?

      As a programmer, probably none of that occurs to you, you figure it just gets pasted in where someone wants it. But I just set up a site for some folks, if they were told that, would look at each other then ask if there is something easier they could use. Finding the right file to edit, then finding the right place in the file to paste it, then making any changes needed in the CSS to get it looking right? Not going to happen.

      I didn’t know that you could program it so that it would handle things without the javascript. That would certainly be a help, since it would eliminate one step for users, having to create some kind of backup.

      That Themeroller is neat. I could play with it for a long time, even though I have no use for it. Even a simplified version of that for styling would make up for a lot of the set up effort. Although I think easier installation would give you a wider audience.

      Did I explain where I was coming from clearly enough? I am happy to give feedback, especially since I will not have to try to make any of it work.

  2. Divine Friend says:

    I found a very useful, simple and fast contact form widget for wordpress.
    The web site is http://aliveprojects.com/apps/contactemailer/how-to-install-contact-form-in-your-wordpress-blog
    I used it and satisfied.

  3. Mark says:

    I’m a big fan of Cforms myself.
    Mark recently posted..Used Car Websites

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