This week WordPress announced they updated their contact form builder for sites on WordPress.com. They also announced they were releasing a plugin that gives self hosted WordPress sites (i.e. WordPress.org) the same contact form.
Now the release of a plugin, especially one that is so utilitarian as a contact form might not seem that exciting to you. But the thing is, nearly every website needs to have a way for visitors to contact the owner of the site.
Insert Forms Button in Edit Screen
For folks who need something over and above a basic contact form, purchasing Gravity Forms is a great way to go.
Enter the Grunion
The folks at Automattic (the company behind WordPress) are calling this new plugin “Grunion” after a Californian coastal fish. Here are some things I like about this new plugin.
Seamless Integration
Grunion Forms Dialog
That makes it drop dead simple to access the form creation dialog screen. You can access it easily from any post or page on your WordPress installation. At the same time it doesn’t take up any extra screen real estate when not in use.
Clicking that button brings up a forms dialog box overlay that behaves in a similar manner to the upload/insert image dialog box.
Easily Customizable
Form Field Options
You also have the ability to customize each of the form field labels however you want to explain what info you want site visitors to enter. And while you are at it, making a field a required entry is as easy as clicking your mouse.
Set Recipient Email
Set Form Recipient Email
The plugin is set to default to the admin email for your site. However you can set each individual form to go to a different email address if you like. Or if you prefer, you can have it sent to multiple addresses.
That’s a very useful feature if you have multiple forms and a need to route them to different places, like if your site has multiple authors or you want to route different types of inquiries to different people.
Akismet Integration
The plugin has integration with Automattic’s powerful spam protection service, Akismet, built right in.
The nice thing about that is you can do away with Captcha forms, which tend to clash with site designs and are not particularly user friendly.
Built-in Archive
Feedbacks Menu Item
When you click it you are taken to a new dashboard page where there a record of received contact form messages is kept. It’s similar to the comments management menu. You have the option to delete the messages or mark them as spam if you don’t want them saved there.
All in all it is one of the most seamless integrations with WordPress that I’ve seen.
A Caution
I’m confident the folks at Automattic will be upgrading the plugin along the way and possibly adding features to it.
One note of caution with this early release, though: When I added a form to an existing page where I’d already typed in some text, the form deleted my existing content when it inserted the short codes for the form.
Since I had Revisions turned on it was no big deal to revert to a previous version of the page and just paste in the short codes.
It would be nice in future releases if the form would be inserted where the cursor was on the page in the same way that images are inserted. It’s a minor thing. But it could potentially freak someone out to have their content totally disappear!
Good night, my friend.
I came here to absorb the knowledge that you provide on this blog. I’m so glad to find this blog and read interesting articles.
Nice to visit here. Next time I will come back.
My greetings.
Good luck!
I had tried this plugin once ..but within two weeks, I got tons of spam mails..so I turned it off. After reading your article, I think, I should have integrated Akismet along with it.
I suggest you use Contact Form 7 in WordPress. It works like a charm!
I’ve used Contact Form 7, and also the Fast Secure Contact Form and they both do a good job. I think that less experienced users will find the Grunion Contact form easier to work with though.
You do have to use Akismet with the Grunion Contact Form plugin for spam protection. At this point Akismet is the only protection built into it.
Man this is getting complicated. I’m going to have to spend more time studying up on WordPress. I’m running an earlier version and need to update. I’m going to subscribe to you…thanks for sharing.
Here are a couple pieces of advice on upgrading from and old version of WordPress. First, backup everything before you start upgrading, especially your database and WordPress files. That way if something goes wrong you can at least get back to where you started from.
The second thing I’ve found is that it is generally a good idea to do incremental upgrades, about one for every major release of the software. This is especially true if your version of WordPress is very outdated. Incremental upgrades can help you avoid some problems that can get into your database when you just do one “big jump” upgrade.
All-in-all it is easier to keep up with the upgrades as they are released.
Chris, thank you for the head’s up about the WP contact form. I currently use Mike Challis’ form and am satisfied with it. Once WP works out the kinks I may make the switch, but I can imagine how frustrating it is when content disappears!
Heya Matt! Glad to help.
Mike’s Fast Secure Contact Form is a great option and has been my contact form of choice for a long time now.
One other thing I noticed about the new Grunion Contact Form is that I had trouble creating a relatively long form with lots of fields with it. Of course for those who really need to create more complex forms in WordPress, Gravity Forms is still the best way to go in my opinion.
True. Form 7 in WordPress works like a charm! It’s fast and very secure and does a great job. I think that less experienced users will find the Grunion Contact form easier to work with though.
Contact Form 7 isn’t fast unfortunately – it also loads on every page whether it is present or not – a disaster for site speed.
the more plugin, the more complex it gets
Good update, I love WordPress!
Word Press is fun … so many plug-ins… but yes going through a hard time learning all the word press installation and usage…
Since customization is the new thing, does that mean if the comment section does not include a place to include your website that the blog’s/article’s owner has removed it?
Heya Kristina! The comment form in WordPress has always been customizable for folks who have the know-how to dive into a little programming. While I haven’t seen it very often, it wouldn’t surprise me that some folks would want to remove the web address from the comment form.
Of course that’s a whole different deal than a contact form like this one from the folks at Automattic. Contact form plugins like this one are usually configurable without any programming required.
Currently I am using Dynamic WordPress Plugin and I think it is best contact form. Dynamic WordPress Plugin Contact Form is provided to consumers under the open source GPL license, you can use it for all your project or at least use it as a foundation for your next projects free and without any restrictions.
Its really good plugin for contact form which i used a lot of times in word press. Thanks a lot !
I have been using Contact Form 7 all the time. Is there a way to overlay it (and without the header/footer/sidebar from the template) on top of any page once someone click on the contact link? Or do you think I should ditch Contact Form 7 and move over to Grunion?
I’m not sure what you mean by overlaying the form. You can easily embed either Contact Form 7 or Grunion onto a page with a shortcode.
This post it a year and a half old. Today I use Gravity Forms instead because it is a much more powerful forms plugin.
Any tips on getting grunion to work in Genesis sidebars? I’ve done it before by editing functions.php to run shortcodes in sidebars.
Actually, Dallas, I’ve switched nearly all of my projects over to the premium Gravity Forms plugin. While it’s not free I’ve found the features available far outweigh the cost.
That and I’m not a fan of how Automattic has rolled virtually all of their plugins into their Jetpack plugin. Now you have to install a ton of stuff you don’t need or want to get the few features you would like to use.