New WordPress Contact Form Installed

While I was browsing around the blog today, I noticed that my contact form was not loading. I reviewed the Kontactr service back in July of 2007 and gave the service some high marks for their easy to use embeddable contact forms. As it turns out, Kontactr.com fails to load for me and has continued to do so all day today. I’m pretty confident that the Kontactr service has died and is now resting in peace with a number of other Web 2.0 startups. As it turns out, their website does load and they are still around. My mistake.

Fear not as I am using WordPress. After checking out the WordPress Extend area and typing in the word Contact into the plugin search box, I was greeted with 12 pages of results. Somewhere in there had to be a contact form for me and indeed, I found one. It’s called, Contact Form 7 written by Takayuki Miyoshi. Contact Form 7 comes with the following feature set:

• Supports multiple contact forms.
• You can customize form and mail contents with simple markup.
• AJAX submitting with jQuery Form Plugin.
• Spam filtering with Akismet.
• Bot prevention with CAPTCHA.

In the options page for Contact Form 7, you can configure the entire layout of your contact form by moving elements around. As part of the form options, there is a tag generator. This tag generator can generate tags for Text Fields, Email Fields, Text Areas, Drop-Down Menus, Checkboxes, Radio Buttons, Acceptance, CAPTCHA, and a submit button. Speaking of CAPTCHA, if you plan on using this security feature with Contact Form 7, be sure to read this article to make sure you have the proper things installed on your webserver to use the CAPTCHA image generation techniques. As far as I can tell, the CAPTCHA is not overly complicated and contains at most, 4 characters which can be any combination of numeric or alphabetic characters.

Contact Form 7 can also be tied into Akismet. Once you tie the plugin into Akismet, emails sent through the form will first be sent to the Akismet server to see if they are spam. Based on the color of the response once you click on the submit button, the message will either be successfully sent or you’ll be presented with an error. For more information in regards to using Akismet with Contact Form 7, check out this article.

If you want to see how it really works, I’ve put two images together side by side. One showing the code view of the contact form and the other image is the contact form in use. I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to put two and two together.

So, if you need to contact me, this contact form is probably the best way of doing so. You can find it on my CONTACT ME page.