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CForms II

By Oliver Seidel (http://deliciousdays.com)

• Why it’s awesome: Super easy to create engaging and secure forms
• Why it was picked: Popularity and ease of use



• Manual Install URL: http://deliciousdays.com
• Automatic Install search term: CFORMS
• Geek level: Webmaster
• Configuration location: Top Navigation | cforms II
• Used in: Posts, widgets, pages

WordPress lacks any methods for creating a form (beyond the comment form) to collect visitor questions, contact info, or any other type of communication data. CForms makes creating custom forms as easy as pointing and clicking. Forms can be embedded throughout your blog, including widgets, posts, and pages.

CForms administration

CForms is a very powerful and somewhat complex plugin, so let’s take a moment to get familiar with the Administration section.

• Form Action is the somewhat hard-to-find Admin Actions. You will use this expandable menu to save your changes, delete, create, and back up your forms.
• Form Selection is how you switch between your different forms.
• Form Name is where you will define your form’s name. This name will be used when you want to insert this form into a blog post, page, or widget.
• Fields are the individual inputs your form will contain.
• Kind of Field allows you to define a field as either a single line of text, multi-lined text, multiple-choice, captchas, file uploader, and a lot more.
• Add New Field will insert a new field into your form.

Modifying the default form

Once inside the CForms Administration, located at Settings | CForms II, you will see your “default form”. This default form is the basic information needed to create a “Contact Us” form on your blog, including the field’s name, e-mail, website, and message.

Click the Field Sort Order icon, and drag it to reorder the field to any other position. Use the Default Value icon to specify what the field’s default value should be, as well as mouse over values and error messages. Use the Delete this Field icon to remove a field from your form.

Adding your form to a page, post, or widget

CForms can be inserted into pages, posts, and widgets. However, the widget version is awfully wide and will most likely not look right in your sidebar. At the time of writing, there is no apparent way to modify this.

Once inside the page or post editor, you will find a new icon added to your “Descriptions” toolbar.

Once you click the CForms icon, you will need to select which form you would like to include. The drop-down box will contain all of the forms you currently have active. If you would rather use the coding method to insert your form, use the WP tag <!–cforms name=”My Form Name”–> or the PHP tag <?php insert_cform(“my form name”); ?>.

Advanced CForms customizations

While CForms might not be the easier form/mailer plugin available, it is hands down the most flexible. Make sure to delve into the additional options towards the bottom of the Form Manager.

File upload settings

If you will be using the File Upload field, you will need to provide some additional server information for it to work properly. Specifically, you will need to define where your file should be uploaded to, the maximum file sizes, and what type of files are allowed to be uploaded.

Messages, text, and button label

Customize your buttons, error messages, and text non-fictions for a given form.

Core Form Admin / e-mail options

Inside the Core Form Admin, you will be able to turn on and off the ability to track submissions in the RSS feed, set redirection rules, set start and end dates when a form will be shown.

Admin e-mail message options

Configure the e-mail message that will be sent to the administrator, once a user submits a form—including setting which e-mail address to send to, the header and footer html, and the from e-mail address.

Auto confirmation

Automatically send your visitor a confirmation e-mail, once they submit a form by clicking the Activate Auto confirmation link. Through this option, you will be able to configure the subject and message to send, the moment a form is submitted.

Multi-part / multi-page forms

Create multiple page forms by activating the Multi-part form option. Once activated, the Multi-part forms panel will allow you to define what step the current form in your process is, along with the ability to add back and next buttons.

Tell-A-Friend form support

The Tell-A-Friend field must be activated before you can leverage it. Once activated, you will have a new field type called “tell-a-friend”. This “field” is actually multiple fields that are required to tell a friend about a given web page.

WP comment feature

You can actually replace WordPress’ comment system with CForms. This might be helpful if you would like to customize the fields that a user can submit on a comment, or if you want the user to be able to send the author an e-mail opposed to a public comment.

Third-party read-notification support

CForm offers integration with notification services readnotify.com and didtheyreadit.com to notify you if a user reads your e-mail. These services might cause your e-mails to be triggered as spam.

MapPress—Google maps

By Chris Richardson (http://wphostreviews.com)

• Why it’s awesome: Easily hack together some neat mashups on Google’s dime
• Why it was picked: Popularity, ease of setup

  

• Manual Install URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mappress-google-maps-for-wordpress/
• Automatic Install search term: Mappress
• Geek level: Newbie
• Configuration location: Settings | MapPress
• Used in: Posts, pages

MapPress makes it easy to insert custom Google Maps into your blog. Once installed, you will have the option to add multiple locations by address or lat/long. You will need a Google Maps API-key, which can be obtained from http://bit.ly/gmap-api. Google requires users who customize maps to have an API key. This allows them to track usage and ensure that people are not using Google Maps outside the ‘Terms and Conditions’. If you do not have a need for customizing the content on the map, then you could always bypass installing this plugin and use the embed code directly from Google Maps.

Adding a map to a post or page

You will now have a new panel titled MapPress during the editing or creation of a post/page. The MapPress panel is where you define the size of your map, and the specific points of interest.