Here at TommusRhodus themes, we love Contact Form 7. This excellent little plugin has been the driving force behind the contact forms in many of our themes for years due to its rock-solid stability and easy to use form creation system, but sometimes you may need a little more than to send emails via a form, such as sign a user up to a mailing list etc.
Thankfully with Contact Form 7 being so popular and well supported, there is no shortage of extensions available so add even more functionality to an already stellar plugin – todays posts bring you a list of the most useful add-ons available which will let you take your forms to the next level.
Contact Form 7 Mailchimp Extension
A popular request from users of our themes is to integrate there contact forms into a mailing system to build up a nice mailing list, although CF7 does not support such a thing ‘out of the box’, the excellent Mailchimp Extension can fill the gap very effectively indeed. If your not a Mailchimp user, you can also opt for the premium Aweber Integration plugin found on CodeCanyon.
Contact Form 7 Honeypot
The one downside to any front end form which is almost impossible to avoid is the dreaded spam! Thankfully CF7 has many options available for keeping things under control Rather than inserting another field for the user to verify themselves with, a popular option is a simply install a ‘honeypot’ which is an effective but not intrusive method of form spamming as it provides a hidden input to attract bots without adding clutter to your form. Contact Form 7 Honeypot is a simple to setup solution and should be part of any form you create.
Its worth mentioning here that CF7 does have a function which works well in addition to the Honeypot extension in the form of the quiz input field, for more on this check out the article here.
Contact Form 7 DB
Another often-requested feature is the ability to store your forms correspondence to the WordPress database. This allows you to track your forms effectiveness as well as turn your WP into a basic CRM so you can better manage the users and messages supplied via your form – this is where Contact Form 7 DB steps in.
Contact Form 7 – Success Page Redirects
Although CF7 provides a neat and rather flexible ‘message sent’ area when users submit your form, sometimes you may wish to forward users to a thank-you page or such. Contact Form 7 – Success Page Redirects takes care of this so you can easily provide further value to your visitors.
Frontend Registration – Contact Form 7
By default, WPs user sign-up process is ok, but rather inflexible and can distract from the overall look of your site by taking users to a less-than glamorous looking sign up page. If your running a site where users can sign up to be a member or such, then Frontend Registration – Contact Form 7 is a great tool for providing a styled, easy to customise user registration form, anywhere on your site.
The post Essential Addons for Contact Form 7 appeared first on TommusRhodus.