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.
Troy Booher
May 13, 2012 at 1:16 amI liked your submission and have already signed your guestbook. I do have an issue with the captcha as I can never seem to read the second part of the code as its always blurry or simply unreadable. Totally understand the need to ensure the person is real but these things are getting to the point where even people are having a hard time using them.
As soon as I get my family site up and running, I will defiantly use the formidable pro plugin and yes, I will most likely include the captcha as well….
Troy
Victor Font
May 13, 2012 at 7:56 amThanks Troy. I’m not wild about Captcha either. On another website I just put up (http://lashaesfund.com/), I took it off the form and am using a hidden field for approvals. The hidden field is set to admin only and requires that I change it to Yes before it shows in the custom display.
Giacomo
March 14, 2013 at 9:37 amI’m very interested in your guestbook, did you really create it using DMSGuestbook plugin ?
Victor Font
March 14, 2013 at 9:47 amMy original guest book from years ago was the DMSGuestbook plugin. I no longer use that because it was so buggy. I created the new (current) guest book myself using Formidable Pro.