More Feedback, Less Spam: WordPress Contact Form Plugin


7 Essential WordPress Hacks: #4. Contact Form

Never, ever put your email address on your Web site — it’s like inviting spammers over for dinner! Instead, use a feedback form that will allow users to send you a message directly from your site.

Oh, and in addition to blocking spam, a handy contact form will provide yet another avenue for audience participation, be it in the form of submissions, information exchange, or just a friendly hello.

So, block spam and encourage the conversation at your site…You in? Then you need our fourth essential hack — the WordPress Contact Form Plugin!

Note: Make sure you grab the Cutline theme for this one, because you’ll need it for the live demonstration!

Flash video: 6:02 in duration

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Helpful links from this episode:

  • Get a domain name, Web hosting, and the amazing 1-click WordPress installation from Colorteck, the Web host that powers Tubetorial.com.
  • If you can’t get your navigation links working, I guarantee you can fix your problem by checking out our first WordPress hack, How to Get More Search Engine Traffic with One Simple Tweak.
  • Read up on navigation links at the Cutline support site.

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17 Comments

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  1. Contact forms get just as much spam as any comment form these days, I’ve heard of some folks who were going to integrate Akismet into their comment form but I don’t know what has come of it yet.

  2. Akismet works great.

    I don’t get a lot of contact form spam at all, but I get plenty of comment spam (which Akismet catches). But no matter what, there’s nothing worse than publishing your email address on a website. Once the spammers get it, you’ve got to eventually just kill it off and get a new mail address.

  3. If you have to put an email address on your site, you can slow down the spam onslaught by using a plugin like caesarmail (google to find).

    Eventually spammers will come to your site and get your addy by seeing it, but this defeats the bots pretty nicely.

    I need it so users can send attachments using their own email client — until I can find or develop a form with that functionality

  4. I didn’t find the Ryan Duff plugin, but there is a contact form ][ plugin which is supposedly an update. This went in very smoothly on a WP 2.06 site.

  5. Boo ya! Just found a PHP5-only, Akismet-checked contact form for pretty much any PHP-based site; not just WordPress. Hence, it’s not a plugin. But it’s very easy to install. Just make a new template (contact.php or whatever), place the form where the content would go, and then make a new page in WP using that new template. Boom.

    Get it via Subversion.

  6. Doug, you’re a life saver. I’ve been getting 20 spam form submits a day for 3 weeks now. I’m installing the new version now.

  7. I have followed all the instructions for installing the contact page, however, I am receiving an error message as follows:

    Internal Server Error

    The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

    Please contact the server administrator, root@foo.tld and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

    More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

    Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

    I’m at a lost…..help please!

  8. Thanks for the plugin, pretty clean and effective.
    One suggestion though, since it’s incompatible with the wpPHPMailer plugin (https://www.coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/), I’d change the mail() function with something like that:

    if ( function_exists(‘wp_mail’) ) {
    wp_mail($recipient, $subject, $fullmsg, $headers);
    } else {
    mail($recipient, $subject, $fullmsg, $headers);
    }

    In my case in which I need to contact an external smtp host because the web server has no mail facility, this patch is a must.

    pfm

  9. the ryan duff site wasnt working when i tried to go onto it but i managed to get a hold of a form plugin tho

  10. nice tutorial. Wondering though, how to make the contact form a small box that is always visible (similar to the one I am typing in now.

  11. So true! This is the exact reason we created Contactize.com. In just a few minutes you can have a free contact form on your website (any website, including wordpress) without any coding or installations needed. Just set up an account and paste a few lines of code into your web page. Your email is never published anywhere.