WordPress Contact Forms

There are a myriad of WordPress contact form plugins out there, and finding one that suits your needs can be difficult.

I recently had reason to search for one and thought I would share some of my findings. Here are four I tried after researching, along with what I feel are their shortcomings.

If you don’t feel like reading all of the below, the essence is cforms II is an incredibly powerful tool and the clear winner for me, but if you’re looking for something really simple Green Beast’s contact form might be a good choice for you.

Enhanced WordPress contact form plugin

This plugin will send an email alright, but you can’t customise it much and there doesn’t seem to be any good validation/feedback to the user if they try to submit the form without completeing it properly. Really didn’t like this one.

Enhanced WordPress contact form plugin

Contact Form 7

I came across several people recommending this one so I had a look. It’s got an odd interface but once you get used to it it’s very customisable. The main issue I had with this form was that once you submitted a form the thank you message was down the bottom and a bit too subtle, and there didn’t seem to be any way to change that without actually digging into the code of the plugin itself.

I feel it’s better to present the user with a page which looks significantly different once they have submitted. Overall I wasn’t crazy about this plugin.

Contact Form 7

Green Beast WordPress-Ready Contact Form

This is a good and simple to use plugin. The only problem I have with it really is that it includes what I feel are some unnecessary form fields such as the ‘Subject’ dropdown which you are required to choose from, however, having said that you can contact the author to get a quote for a customisation to be done on the form for you. Worth checking out, it might suit you perfectly out of the box.

Green Beast WordPress-Ready Contact Form

cforms II

cforms is an incredibly versatile and powerful contact form plugin, which allows you to create complex forms and style them using CSS.

I had some trouble getting this plugin to work on a blog which was not installed at the root, but there was plenty of documentation on fixing this issue in the FAQ.

This plugin might be a little daunting because of it’s feature rich nature, but the amount of control is impressive. I love it. Clear winner. Gold star.

cforms II

Thanks to the Twitterers who helped in my quest: @donncha, @gavreilly and @paulmcclean. Apologies if I left anyone out!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.