Month: November 2012

A forms plugin with an easy-to-use interface can make the creation of custom forms virtually painless. Whereas form creation used to require HTML coding experience, now just about anybody can set up even the most complex, multi-part forms. The forms we’ve selected here are some of the major players that support powerful custom form builders within the WordPress dashboard. Gravity Forms You can’t talk about WordPress form building plugins without mentioning Gravity Forms. An all-time favorite plugin of WordPress professionals, Gravity Forms goes far beyond your simple contact form. The plugin has tons of free and commercial add-ons that make nearly anything possible, including the ability to create subscriptions, directories, polls, invoices with Freshbooks, integrations with MailChimp, aWeber, Constant Contact and much more. Ninja Forms The lite version of Ninja Forms is available in the WordPress plugin repository and includes an easy-to-use form builder, customized field options, entry management and tons of hooks for developers. Users who upgrade to Pro will be able to implement file uploads, front-end posts submissions, multi-part forms and the ability to save users’ progress. Subscribers receive excellent support with all requests answered within 12 hours or less. Formidable Forms Formidable Forms is another plugin that comes in both a lite and a pro version. Users can easily create forms with a simple drag-and-drop interface. It includes advanced capabilities for users to create posts, pages, and custom posts types with your forms, as well as the ability to manage and edit them from the front-end of your site. Formidable also integrates with reCAPTCHA and Akismet for Spam control. Breezing Forms Breezing Forms is a newer plugin that is unique in that there is no lite version. It boasts a surprising number of robust features for free, including multipage forms, powerful conditional fields without need for Javascript, AJAX file uploads with progress bars, and lots more. Breezing Forms has many of the features that you might normally expect from an enterprise-class forms building plugin. Use it to create simple contact forms, feedback forms, surveys, payment forms, calculations or complex forms. Form Maker Form Maker is available in a free version from the wordpress.org repository and also a commercial version. This plugin allows you to customize the colors, fonts, submit buttons and the size of the form elements. It also allows for custom CSS and Javascript. The form creator is integrated with the standard WordPress editor. The commercial version allows for unlimited fields and offers integration with Google Maps API. Contact Form Manager The Contact Form Manager has a broad appeal and has been downloaded more than 55,000 times with mostly 5 star ratings. It allows you to create multiple custom forms and place them on your site using shortcodes. The plugin includes the ability to send an auto-reply as well as redirect the user upon form submission. It supports all of the most common form elements, has built-in spam protection and essentially includes everything you might want in a simple webform. Visual Form Builder Visual Form Builder is a plugin designed to make the form creation process quick and easy so that the user has no need to edit any PHP, CSS, or HTML. You can add form fields with one click and reorder them via drag and drop. It includes a logic-based anti-SPAM system, confirmations messages that you can customize, the ability to manage form entries in the WordPress dashboard and multiple field layout options. One cool feature of the Visual Form Builder is the ability to duplicate forms with one click. You can also embed multiple forms on posts and pages. The plugin also has quite an extensive FAQ section for troubleshooting and customizing. Check it out and download it for free on WordPress.org. Source: WPMU