WordPress Contact Form 7 plugin: Great for Forms

If you’ve started a WordPress blog, probably one of the first things that would be on your list is creating a contact form so that readers would be able to interact with you. I’ve used a number of Contact Form WordPress plugins for sites I have created.

Recently, I decided to try out the WordPress Contact Form 7 plugin created by Takayuki Miyoshi. The features are flexible and simple. It allows you to create multiple contact forms for different purposes. It has support for Akismet spam filtering and captcha.

Installing the Contact Form 7 plugin

Installing the plugin is pretty straightforward. The procedure for installing it is the same as you would install any other WordPress plugin. If you’re using a new version of WordPress, you can also install it using the WordPress plugin install function found at the “Plugins | Add new” menu. Just search for “Contact Form 7″. When the search results are displayed, look for “Contact Form 7″ and click on the install button. This will show a “plugin info screen” with the “Install” button on the upper right area of the screen (shown in image below).

Once the plugin has been downloaded, you will see another screen and just click on the Activate option to activate the plugin.

The contact form creation screen

Before anything else, let’s first take a look at the admin screen of the Contact Form 7 plugin. You can access this from the “Tools | Contact Form 7″ menu item of your WordPress blog.

Above is a screenshot of the Contact Form 7 admin screen. I’ve placed numbers on the areas to identify them and briefly describe the necessary areas for this how to.

1. Contact Form List / Add New – You’ll see a list of your contact forms in this area. In the above example there is only one contact form named Contact Form 1. Also you’ll find a link labeled “Add New” which allows you to create more contact forms if you need them.
2. Contact Form Name – This displays the name of the contact form that you are currently editing. Clicking on the name will actually allow you to edit / change the name.
3. Copy / Delete – These two links allow you to copy the contact form or delete the contact form.
4. Contact Form Shortcode – This is the actual text that you need to paste into the WordPress page you need to create in order to display the contact form.
5. Contact Form Template – This area displays the template code that your contact form will use. You can insert text and other html tags to control the layout of your contact form. It also includes the contact form fields that you generate from the Contact Form Tag/Field Generator (no. 6) on the left side.
6. Contact Form Tag/Field Generator – This tool will help you create the necessary tags / fields for your contact form. You can create different types of tags/fields for your contact form. Examples are text fields for allowing your site’s visitor to input their names. Or email fields for email addresses.
7. Mail Form – This is where you will put in the information from your contact form so that it gets emailed to you. Several fields are required. The “To” field is where you put the email address where the data on the the Mail form will be sent. The “From” field is usually where the email address of the person who is trying to contact you. Put the data you want to be able to read when you receive the email in the “Message Body” field.
8. Second Mail Form – Similar to the Mail Form (no. 7). This allows you to send a second email when someone tries to send you a message thru the contact form.
9. Contact Form Messages – This is a list of messages that the Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin displays when it encounters certain events. An example, for instance, is when a filled out form was successfully sent. You can modify the messages that are displayed. Hint: If your readers are Spanish, you can change the messages to Spanish.
10. Save Button – To save the changes you make to your contact form.

Making your first contact form

When starting to create a contact form that will work for your WordPress blog using the Contact Form 7 plugin, I suggest that you first plan out what you need. The Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin allows you to create a custom form that will more or less fit your requirements. It also allows you to create more than one form, so a little planning won’t hurt.

The default setup of the Contact Form 7 plugin is actually almost ready for use. All that would be needed is to enter your email address into the Mail Form (no. 7 in the figure above) “To” field and you’re done. Pretty much works right out of the box for a simple contact form.

Extra Features if you need them

The Contact Form 7 plugin is not just a simple contact form plugin. It actually has a lot of features to offer to create forms for your WordPress blog. For one thing, you are not limited to just a single form. You can create several forms for actually different purposes.

For instance you can use it to create an article submission form or a request form or even a Link submission form (I’m actually going to create one for my Web Directory WordPress plugin while I haven’t put in the functionality yet.).

Other features include the ability to let people upload files via a contact form and have them emailed to you.

It also has several spam protection options under the hood. For instance, you can have Akismet check for spam when a form is submitted. You can also include Captcha into your forms.

Overall, Contact Form 7 is a simple yet flexible plugin for doing forms that you need for your WordPress blog. You can checkout more info about the plugin over at Takayuki Miyoshi’s plugin page.