What is a WordPress Contact Form

I am sure everyone knows what WordPress is. Just to be sure, WordPress is an “open source blog publishing application” that is built using PHP and MySql. So if you want to start a blog, WordPress is one of the easiest platforms you can use to manage it. One of its strengths comes from the fact that you can use 3rd party Widgets and Plugins to rearange content without changing any PHP code. This makes WordPress very user friendly.

As every website out there, WordPress users also want to have a “contact us” page, so that visitors can send messages. A simple way to achieve that is to use a contact form plugin. There are several out there, but the most popular are WP Contact Form, Contact Form 7 and 123ContactForm for WordPress.

Contact Form 7 plugin was developed by Takayuki Miyos back in 2007. Even though it claimes to be “just another contact form plugin”, it’s much more than that. It’s a fully customizable WordPress contact form plugin that includes anti spam image verification (Captcha), Ajax based submission and a fully integrated spam filter based on Akismet. After installation, a new box will appear in your WordPress Administration panel. Through that, you can customize your web forms. Furthermore, on Contact Form 7’s official website you can find a paid PDF guide, that is very usefull for begginers.

WP Contact Form is a relatively simple plugin for WordPress. After installation, all you have to do is include a tag line in a post and you will have a brand new email form. Not very customizable, but pretty fast to deploy if you are in a hurry.

The final position in my list is ocupied by a contact form plugin for WordPress developed by 123ContactForm. Installation and deployment is similar to every plugin that’s out there, but there is a catch: by installing this plugin you gain access to a wide variety of features that cannot be included in a stand alone plugin. 123ContactForm is an online contact form generator that made this plugin so that every WordPress user can access a wide variety of templates and advanced features like field validation, multiple or custom recipients, messages archive, reference id, payment integration with Paypal and Google Checkout.

No matter what plugin you are using, just make sure it’s configured corectly and test it by filling the contact form yourself.