Easy Form Creation with Formidable Pro
At one time guestbooks were a very popular website feature. I've had one on my family website for years. When I ported everything over from the static site to WordPress, I wanted to keep the tradition alive. Search WordPress.org for a guestbook plugin, and there are only 16 returned results. Some of them have absolutely nothing to do with guestbooks.
I tried a few of them and eventually settled on DMSGuestbook. At first it worked just fine, but as time went on and WordPress matured, the developer didn't keep up with changing requirements. As a result, the plugin's performance degraded and conflicted with many newer plugins. I knew I needed to do something to address the problem, but I didn't know what. Then along comes Formidable Pro. Formidable Pro comes with 5 pre-made templates. They are a Contact Form, a Real Estate Listing form, one for capturing User Information, another for creating a Defect/Bug/Issue Report, and the last to create a Job Application. Unfortunately, there isn't one for a Guestbook page. Happily, it means that I have an opportunity to build one for myself and dive deeply under the hood of Formidable Pro.
Building the form itself is very simple. The following video demonstrates how I started with the contact form template and turned it into a guestbook form.
Isn't that easy? In real-time (without all the talking), it takes just a few minutes to create this form, but we're not done yet. We still need to learn about the settings page, displaying the form on a page, and creating a conditional custom display to show the form's entries. If you want to see where we're headed with this series of tutorials, you can visit the Guestbook page on my family website. http://www.fontlife.com/about/guestbook/.
And while you are looking, please don't leave without signing the guestbook.
Now that you've created your guestbook form, please take a look at the next tutorial, The Custom Display.
Affiliate Disclosure
In the spirit of full disclosure, I am an affiliate for this wonderful product. I use it on all of my websites and on those belonging to my clients. If you choose to buy it, please click my affiliate link to purchase it and receive my undying gratitude.
