163 – Different Options for Contact Forms for WordPress
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Listener Feedback
Question from Steve Stewart : How many plugins are too many?
Different Options for Contact Forms for WordPress
- Gravity Forms
- Gravity Forms 1.8 Update
- New User Interface
- Trash Menu
- Upload Multiple Files per form
- Know Who Else is Working on a Form
- Enhanced Export
- Gravity Forms 1.8 Update
- Contact Form 7
- More difficult to use
- Have to manually configure both the form and the email
- No pre-generated fields like states or countries
- WuFoo
- Accounts
- Free – 1 User, 3 Forms, 10 Fields
- $14.95 – $199.95 per month
- Integrated with Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, Chargify
- 150+ templates and themes
- Spam Prevention with Captcha
- Accounts
- Visual Form Builder
- Much like gravity forms
- Drag and drop form building
- More functionality with Pro version ($20 – $249 per year)
- JetPack
- Very simple forms
- Results are scanned for spam before emailed with Akismet
- Includes text boxes, textarea, radio, checkbox or dropdown fields
- Shows success when successful, if you’d like to go to a custom page, you need the 42U Jetpack Booster plugin
- Google Forms
- Templates for
- Planning an Event
- Collecting Feedback
- Replace Paper Forms
- Least integrated into WordPress
- No ability to style
- Templates for
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163 – Best episode yet. Full of interesting information.
Jan 16, 2014I’ve used cForms7, but not Gravity Forms, even though I keep hearing good things about it.
On the last site I built, which had 9 different forms, I used the free version of NinjaForms. I was very impressed with it. It is very powerful, and has “favorite” fields, which are fields that you create and then can save for use on other forms (for example a list of colors, or states, etc). They also have a bunch of ad-ons which look like they really expand the functionality and their support was phenomenal.
I’m not affiliated with them in any way, but thought I’d share. I’d love to know how you feel NinjaForms stack up against Gravity Forms. http://ninjaforms.com/
Jan 16, 2014I use Jetpack for most sites, since they only need simple forms. Several clients have Gravity Forms licenses, and I enjoy working with it. I’ll probably buy a developer license at some point. Before Jetpack I used Contact Form 7 a lot, and I still use it occasionally. I recently tried
Jan 16, 2014Fast Secure Contact Form (http://wordpress.org/plugins/si-contact-form/) after hearing good things, and it seems like it’s between Contact Form 7 and Gravity Forms for ease of use.
Chad Warner I’ll have to take a look at Fast Secure Contact Form!
Jan 16, 2014TristanChaika I can’t believe I forgot about Ninja Forms! Excellent as well.
Jan 16, 2014I’m using Jetpack on my site cos I didn’t want to install an extra plugin just for a contact form. Previously using Contact Form 7 until I came across a jQuery conflict, though.
Jan 17, 2014Jetpack form is straightforward, but I don’t like their default submit button, so I always replace it with my custom made button, which is a bit troublesome as I need to edit a few lines of code in grunion-contact-form.php every time a plugin gets updated. Wondering whether there is any way to make this change permanent. Anyway, this is a good topic, thanks Dustin!
I use gravity forms myself now for one or two simple forms and one more complex form. For ordinary contact forms I mainly stick with Contact Form 7 and also used Fast Secure Contact Form on some sites.
There are other Plugins like
– Ninja Forms (free, with premium extensions)
http://wordpress.org/plugins/ninja-forms/, http://ninjaforms.com
– Formidable Forms (free and pro version)
http://wordpress.org/plugins/formidable/, http://formidablepro.com/
– Quform and others on codecanyon.net
that seem to get much less attention than gravity forms but seem to be worth exploring too.
Any experiences here?
One client wanted a contact form where the entered data is not only sent as an email but also as an vCard (.vcf)-Attachment for direct import to Outlook.
I wondered that non of the available form plugins seems to have this by default and I didn’t find any easy solution yet. I’m sure it would be doable as an extension for gravity forms or some of the other plugins.
Jan 17, 2014Any hints or ideas or experiences on this?
JoeyF Hey Joey, there should be a way to change that code once so you don’t have to keep changing it over and over. What code are you replacing and what are you replacing it with?
Jan 17, 2014dhartzler10 Hi Dustin, thank you for kindly looking into it! I’m replacing the codes line 880-883 in grunion-contact-form.php (top) with my version linking to a custom made button (bottom).
************************
$r .= “tt<input type=’submit’ value='” . esc_attr( $form->get_attribute( ‘submit_button_text’ ) ) . “‘ class=’pushbutton-wide’/>n”;
if ( is_user_logged_in() ) {
$r .= “tt” . wp_nonce_field( ‘contact-form_’ . $id, ‘_wpnonce’, true, false ) . “n”; // nonce and referer
}
************************
Jan 18, 2014$r .= “tt<input type=’image’ value='” . esc_attr( $form->get_attribute( ‘submit_button_text’ ) ) . “‘ src=’http://lastlights.net/images/submit.png’/>n”;
$r .= “tt” . wp_nonce_field( ‘contact-form_’ . $id, ‘_wpnonce’, true, false ) . “n”; // nonce and referer
************************
It would be very nice if this change can be permanent some way. I’m by no means a serious web developer, so I have no clue, haha. Anyway, thanks for your help!
dhartzler10 Hi Dustin, I have replied to this, but somehow does not appear (except when I’m logged into livefyre). Maybe considered as spam due to the lines of PHP code? Not sure whether you can see from your admin end.
Jan 22, 2014JoeyF that’s weird! I don’t see any comment at all 🙁
Send it to me at Dustin@YourWebsiteEngineer.com and I can take a look.
Jan 22, 2014OSPInteresting Thanks Cynthia. I’m a huge fan of your show too. I’m so thankful you recommended Canva. It rocks!
Jan 29, 2014I have been using http://wordpress.org/plugins/formidable/
Feb 16, 2014Drag and Drop as well as customizable.
It has never failed me. I have Contact Form 7 but there was an update that brought all the sites I had used it for offline so I have never gone back.
The form can be seen on my site at http://www.functionalwebpages.com.au/contact/
Hi Dustin, did you know that you can also add Facebook Messenger to your website and allow your customers to message you directly? http://bit.ly/1RfW4Gw
Dec 1, 2015