We recently told you that we launched Nelio Forms, a plugin for creating contact forms that fully integrates with the WordPress block editor. So if you’re already familiar with the WordPress editor for creating pages and posts, creating forms is just as easy.
The purpose of having a contact form on your website is that your visitors can contact you. Two of the great advantages of the forms over sending you any email is that, with forms you receive the information in a structured way and you can also control spam. Let’s see how we have these features with Nelio Forms.
Nelio Forms
A fantastic contact plugin using the block editor. In its simplicity lies the true power of this plugin. I love it, very versatile and it worked perfectly for me.
Wajari Velasquez
Create and Display a Form
First of all, let me briefly summarize how we create and display a form with Nelio Forms.
To create a new form, you just have to click on “Add new” in the Nelio Forms plugin. Then the block editor you already know opens with a default form preset:
From here, you can add text or specific contact form blocks such as text input fields, text area, email, phone, password, checkbox, number, or URL fields. You can also use columns in your form to create complex layouts. In addition, in the contact forms you can specify which fields are required and customize the properties of the submit button as if it were any other button.
Once the contact form has been created, you only need to insert a form block on any page and select the newly created form to have it available on that page.
Form Submit Actions
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the great advantage of creating a form with a plugin is that you receive the information in a structured way. But how do you specify where to receive the information?
With Nelio Forms, you have two form submission actions available: “Entry recording” and “Email notification.” You can select one or both options as you prefer.
Entry Recording
If you indicate to record submissions, the answers to your forms will be saved in your WordPress database and you will be able to see them in the “Entries” tab of the plugin.
You can send the entries you want to the trash and you can also see the details of each of the submissions received by clicking on «View».
Email Notification
If you added an email notification, you must specify the details of how you want to receive the mail:
- the name of the action, which by default is “Email notification”,
- the email address to whom it should be sent, which by default is the site administrator’s email address. But you can put any other or add more than one address if you want the information to be sent to more than one person,
- the sender’s email address, which by default is the site administrator’s email address. But you can also select the email address that has been filled in with the email address field of the form,
- the address of whom you want to reply to. As with the previous field, you can select the email address that has been filled in the form,
- the subject of the email, so that you can identify exactly where the mail is coming from,
- the email message, in which, by default, you’ll find all the form fields. But you can add or modify the text as you wish.
Integration with Akismet
Another great advantage of having visitors to your website contact you through a contact form instead of by email is that you can control spam. To do this, Nelio Forms integrates with Akismet, a powerful anti-spam service provided by Automattic. Akismet protects the comments that are written on any post on your website and, by integrating it with Nelio Forms, it also protects any form that is fill out.
For its integration with Nelio Forms, you’ll first have to activate Akismet (this plugin is already installed by default in any WordPress installation) and then use an Akismet API key to register it on your site. If you have a personal blog, you can get a free API key, but you also have different plans for any commercial website.
Make sure you have entered your API key in the Akismet plugin settings for it to work properly.
Next, enable the following setting to make sure Akismet validates your form submissions:
In this way, Akismet will check if the content of the fields corresponding to the name, email, URL and text message are spam or not. To ensure that Akismet is working properly on your site, try submitting a form filled with the following information:
- Name: viagra-test-123
- Email: akismet-guaranteed-spam@example.com
- Message: akismet-guaranteed-spam
You will see how in the form itself, it is already shown that the data you have submitted has been flagged as spam.
And when you check the list of received messages, you will find the received message in the Spam folder.
Additionally you can also specify the correspondence between the fields that Akismet should check and the fields filled in the form. This is particularly useful when you have forms with multiple input fields.
Conclusion
With the Nelio Forms plugin, saving in your WordPress and/or by email the information that users have filled in any contact form is very easy. In addition, you can avoid receiving spam thanks to the integration with Akismet.
On our website, all the contact forms you will find are created with Nelio Forms and we are delighted. What are you waiting for to try this plugin?
Featured image by Austin Distel on Unsplash.
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