WP Garage » forms

Using WordPress comments as a contact form

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 11:26:59 +0000

Justin Tadlock has posted a way to use built-in WordPress comments in lieu of a contact form. Basically, you replace your theme’s current comments.php file with the one that Justin offers for downloading that checks if a page is called “Contact.” If it is, the comments stay hidden on that page. You can change the comments.php file so that other pages on your site will also hide comments.

Then you can create your contact page which will display the comment form, but any comment submissions will stay hidden.

The advantages:

Don’t need to use another plugin
Don’t need to tweak a plugin
Can theoretically manage all contact form submissions from your site rather than via email.

The disadvantages:

Submissions are actually comments, so they end up in your comment queue. If you have a lot of comments on your site, that can get hard to manage.
if you ever change themes or your “comments.php” file, then your comments on your “Contact” page will no longer be private. This can be solved by deleting all of these types of comments, which I personally don’t like because I like to save letters from readers; or using this solution forever, which is kind of a long-term commitment.

It’s an interesting idea, and worth considering.

Even Simpler WordPress Contact Form

New WordPress contact form plugin from Perishable Press

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:42:40 +0000

Perishable Press has released a new contact form WordPress plugin called Contact Coldform. The main selling point behind this plugin seems to be its “sqeaky clean” PHP, and the fact that it’s standards compliant. Here are the features that I think are the most significant and unique:

Customizable anti-spam challenge question to protect against spam.
Secure form processing and protection against malicious attacks.
Same-page error messages to help users complete required fields.
No obtrusive markup or code added to your .
Includes option to enable users to send carbon copies to themselves.
Coldform message includes IP, host, agent, and much more.
Customizable everything!

Contact Coldform from Perishable Press

Contact form WordPress plugin includes Hebrew and Spanish

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:27:20 +0000

Here’s a contact form that comes in a Hebrew and Spanish version. We used it over here. It does the trick, and is easy to configure.

SCF2 Contact Form » LaptopTips

Unique and useful WordPress Plugins at Urban Giraffe

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 09:15:43 +0000

Urban Giraffe has a list of amazing plugins that the guy behind the site, John Godley, developed. Many of these plugins are really unique, and I haven’t seen anything like them anywhere else.

Here are the ones that I find most interesting, and I hope to try out soon:

Filled In – Places a customized form on your site, and stores submitted data in a database. The plugin features email reporting, AJAX support, CAPTCHA support, and file uploads. The data can be exported to CSV or XML.
Advanced Permalinks – If you decide midway to change your permalink structure to something friendlier, this generally means you have to do it sitewide and for all existing posts, which means redirecting everything. This plugin allows you to say “From now on, all posts will have permalink structure B, while posts until now will retain permalink structure A.” Can save a lot of headache.
Search Unleashed – Makes searching WordPress blogs more user-friendly by adding the following features:
- Full text search with wildcards and logical operations
- Search posts, pages, comments, titles, URLs, tags, and meta-data (all configurable)
- Search data after it has been processed by plugins, not before
- Search highlighting of all searches, including titles and comments
- Search highlighting of incoming searches from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Baidu, and Sogou
- Search results show contextual search information, not just a post excerpt
- Record search phrases and display in a log
- Exclude specific posts and pages from results
- Compatible with WP-Cache
- Supports WordPress 2.0.5 through to 2.3
- No changes required to your theme
User Permissions – Allows you to assign permissions to specific posts. This sounds like it could be good if you offer premium content on your site.
Anti-Email Spam – Simple plugin to encode email addresses with either JavaScript or HTML entities and protect yourself against email harvesting scripts. I should have done something like this a loooong time ago.

See ‘em all at: Plugins – Goodies for WordPress | Urban Giraffe»