4 Contact Form Solutions For WordPress

Posted on 18. Jan, 2010 by Alex Denning in Plugins

The contact form is a simple thing and often overlooked both in adding one and styling it. This post will address that with a number of options for creating a contact form that can be added to a WordPress blog site.

1. The Free plugin

There are a number of plugins available, but one of the favourites is the Contact Form 7 plugin. I’ve personally not used it, but it looks simple enough: install it, create your form, create a page and just drop it into the page. It’s got an extensive community built around it, including being supported by Crowd Favourite’s WordPress Help Center. Simple but effective is probably the best way of describing it.

2. The paid plugin

GravityForms is mind boggolingly comprehensive and really is a brilliant plugin, if a little pricey at $39 for the basic version. However, it’s very impressive and I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone wanting to create something a little more than a contact form – with options to upload files, you could do a lot more than a contact form with it:

3. The Wufoo option

Just like I like GravityForms, I’m also a big fan of Wufoo. It’s a really easy to use form builder that’s free to use although there are paid versions available for heavy users. Much like GravityForms, you can really easily edit fields through a neat interface. Integrating it into WordPress is easy enough — click ‘Code’, then ‘Embed Form Code’ and copy and paste the JS code into a page or post (in HTML view) and hit update. You should then have a form! Probably the best option for those who just want a simple form that won’t get used a ton.

4. The custom form option

Not for everyone, but the final option is to use a custom form. The obvious advantage here is that you have total control over both styling and content and if the form is how customers are going to get in contact with you then it can really be worth spending a bit of time making a contact form that stands out. For the form itself, you’d do best to grab one off CodeCanyon (ThemeForest’s sister site). The one I went for is one with a bit of AJAX built in for extra nice-ness. At $4, it’s not expensive either. You’ll then have to create a custom page template and include all the relevant files (and importantly CSS). Custom page templates are created with the following syntax at the top of a page:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Contact
*/
?>

You might find multiple headers are useful here – to do so the WordPress way, save your new header as header-contact.php and instead of <?php get_header(); ?> use <?php get_header('contact'); ?>. You’ll then be done with an awesome form that’ll attract visitors from around the globe with it’s awesomeness!

I hope this post has been of some help if you need some guidance choosing which type of form to go with – enjoy!

Tags: Contact Form

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Alex Denning is the founder of WPShout. A WordPress developer from London, Alex co-founded WPShift at the start of 2010 where he sells awesome WordPress themes.

You can find Alex on Twitter and at AlexDenning.com.

16 Responses to “4 Contact Form Solutions For WordPress”

Anonymous
18. Jan, 2010
CForms for the win!
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Devin
18. Jan, 2010
cForms is the plug-in I use most- surprised it didn’t get a mention. It has jquery date pickers, automatic replies, and a number of styling options. An excellent free GPL alternative to Gravity Forms.
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Carrie Isaac
18. Jan, 2010
I also use cForms and like it, for the most part. Only thing I don’t like is the limited styling options, but that’s probably just because I haven’t figured out how to change them yet.
I used Contact Form 7 for quite awhile and thought it was great, but then a couple of the forms stopped working – they would submit correctly, but no email would ever be sent. Didn’t seem to be a problem with server mail settings because some of the forms on the site worked and some didn’t.
Still frustrated thinking about the leads that might have been lost because the form wasn’t working!
So far I really like cforms and haven’t had any issues with it
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- Devin
  23. Jan, 2010
  I wasn’t too excited the default styles with cForms either. I built my own, which is definitely viable with some css- but I agree that it would be nice to have a few more options there.
  Reply to this comment
Kirk O'Connor
19. Jan, 2010
I commonly use Contact Form 7 and find it more than a match for most client sites, however, when i need something more i have used Gravity Forms.
What the vid doesn’t show is that when a client sends a gravity form the form is actually also available in WordPress admin. So if you have a situation where you want to make sure that every form is logged and never “lost” this is a great feature.
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- Alex Denning
  20. Jan, 2010
  Fair point. Really love Gravity Forms’ extensive options!
  Reply to this comment
Nick Parsons
19. Jan, 2010
Good thoughts here – I personally use Contact Form 7, and am very happy with that.
I like the custom form option too, being a do-it-yourselfer. I’ll have to give cForms a look though, since that sounds pretty good.
Anyways, thanks for the great post!
Reply to this comment
- Alex Denning
  20. Jan, 2010
  Glad to see it’s useful
  Reply to this comment
Udegbunam Chukwudi
20. Jan, 2010
You left out Wp Spam Free. As well as keeping spam to a minimum it also serves as a contact form without the hassles of captcha
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- Alex Denning
  20. Jan, 2010
  True, but I only wanted to include one free plugin.
  Reply to this comment
John Zemler
21. Jan, 2010
What a timely post, at least for me. I am need of a contact form and trying to sort it out.
My schedule and low tech abililties allow me only about one design item a week on my site. I am very much the tortise stacked up against all of these hares. But I also benefit from reading the comments of people who are so much further along in blog wizardry.
If I had suggested a post that would have benefited my own particular needs, it would have been this one on contact forms- Thanks!
Sempoer Pax, Dr. Z
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Nicolas
22. Jan, 2010
Happy with Contact Form 7 as well. Used cForms but in the end it was a little over kill for what I use the contact form.
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chris
22. Jan, 2010
ditto everyone namedropping cforms. it’s my favorite also. the only bad with cforms for me is that it’s not hosted in the wordpress.org database, so when there’s a new version, you get a link to download a copy of the update, rather than being able to automatically install the new version. i’d be interested to know how it stacks up against your paid option, because cforms has a lot of meat to it with custom stylesheets, uploaded files, smtp options, auto-replies, comment form integration, etc, etc, etc…
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Theo
01. Feb, 2010
I also use Contact Form 7 and i`m happy with it. The only think i did not figured out yet is how to put a width and height to the ajax-loader image. Thus it is not so powerful as Cforms
Nice article thanks.
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Steph
10. Mar, 2010
I’m a little late on this one, but I’ve recently released Formidable. It’s a powerful contender in both the free and premium plugin realms.
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