I use Contact Form 7 plugin for quite a few things here on MomDot. While the most obvious reason I use it is to receive inquiries on the site for reviews, giveaways, PR releases, and general questions, I also use it for our Ethical Blogger pledge and forum applications. However upon first glance it can be a quite difficult plugin to navigate and can frustrate people in setting it up. It is however easier to use than many a online form builder. I wanted to do a short tutorial to help out those that may be staring at it and on the verge of tears. Its easier than you think once you learn it.

Once you have downloaded and installed into your wordpress program, you can hit ADD NEW to start to create forms. Do not forget to NAME it in case you do several of these over the life of your blog.

Now in my initial form, some standard stuff inputs itself in there to help you out……and this is fine as long as you don’t want anything customized like a drop down, a paragraph, or to have some of your spaces required to be filled out.

Now if you know how to create HTML forms, then you can skip this part and input directly for your coding, add the generated tag to a page and you are done. But if you are like the rest of us, you may need some help with that html tag. Just scroll to the right and there will be a list of “types” for your entries.

Lets practice with the Drop Down Menu.

Let’s say you need a drop down menu. Click on that and this will appear:

Then you have to add your information. Change the title so its something easy to remember for this form. Add your selections, decide if its required (if so check required), decide if there is more than one choice for the drop down. It then will create a tag for you to add into the form on the left.

There will also be a second code generated and you add it below in the email. This is so when the form comes to you, it shows you in your email what question was answered. It’s important to not forget this step or you will get a letter like this:

• trisha
• momdot
• cats
• i dont like cheese

Basically you will have no clue what you ahd in the form that there were answers like that.

Once you are all done adding every question you need, you can save it and it will generate a tag for the page to be created. All you do is copy that code, create a PAGE on your blog, go to the HTML side, insert this code, save and publish.

 

For the page we created, it will look like this when published:

I have found that Contact Form 7 has met all of my contact form needs and most importantly has caused very little server overloads, which is great when you are adding in plugins on wordpress.You can download for your blog right in your dashboard on the new plugins side.

~trisha