Anyone who has worked even for a small time on web development would know how important forms are for a website. And the biggest problem system integrators such as myself come across is the unavailability of great forms extensions for CMS systems.

I came across Contact Forms 7 for Wordpress sometime back and didn't feel much of it. It was used for it's name-sake behaviour, a contact form. It allowed you to set up contact information of a client in the form and define up to two email addresses where the email needs to be sent. The body of the email and th e form it self was configurable through the plugin interface it self (which was a bit of a relief). But then it was pretty much that, it was just a form with text fields.

Quite recently, one of my long time customers came up with a request. A request to set up a listings site on Wordpress. We didn't want any fancy listing extensions or CCKs on Wordpress and wanted to keep the system really really simple. We wanted the visitors of the site to be able to submit listings and the admins to 'approve' the listing. Long story short, we decided to just have one form where the clients will submit the listing, the admins get it emailed and they will simply enter it on the site. -> A form component.

The form the clients had to use when submitting the listing needed to have pretty much all the form controls you would have; text boxes, text areas, check boxes and file uploads. The data that the clients enter will then be emailed to the admins and the admins will copy the details and enter it to the database. A fairly simple solution, though it contains a bit of manual work.

Knowing that the Contact Form 7 was possibly a candidate, I started off building their site around this. To my pleasent surprise, Contact Form 7 offered a vary good support for html forms, it allows you to set up any form control that you name, text boxes, radio buttons, checkboxes, lists and file uploads. The best part is that it even allows Captcha validations and validations for mandatory fields. All you need to do is just mark them up with an *. The uploaded files can be attached to the email it self and be sent to two separate email addresses. It even allows you to customise the error messages that are displayed when the validations fail. AND you can define as many forms as you like, each with it's own variation of fields and validations and email recipients.

There are some things that I would like to see in this extension though, support for hidden fields and ability to render PHP (or at least pick up variables from $_REQUEST/$_SESSION). We all know that it is great to be able for the customers to contact us, but what is even greater (and something that marketing specialists would call utopia) would be to know when/where exactly they contacted us and what exactly he was doing before they contacted us. Imagine how great it would be to tell the client 'Btw, if you are interested in this other product, we have a great series over here!'. There are easy ways to get the same thing done, you can easily edit the core of the extension and extract all the information you need (like post/page IDs, entrance paths etc.), but I'd still prefer it if it came with the component it self.

There are of course, other things we'd like to have with a 'FORM'; A custom submission/processing page or hooks that kick in prior to the emails being sent (imagine being able to log these information on a database before getting alerted via email). But I guess that's really not the point of Contact Form 7.

So all in all, what's my verdict? Contact Forms 7 is a great forms extension for Wordpress which offers a great deal of functionality off the shelf. It allows even the people who are not very technically oriented to develop a great contact solution. Interested? Go ahead and download it from Contact Form 7 homepage. After all, it does come free!

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