For a client of mine, i’ve been using the PEAR-package HTML_QuickForm which is ‘superseded’ by now and isn’t compatible to php 5.2, whereas the followup package HTML_Quickform2 is still in alpha state. Since the client switched his server and that is running php 5.2, i had to come up with a new solution. I tried out many wordpress contact-form-plugins but they all did not satisfy me fully.

The only form-plugin that i truly would recommend is cForms II. It is flexible, can handle more than one form template. Forms can be inserted via template files or via tags inside posts or pages. I think this is the only plugin that supports individual Fieldsets (this can be very handy for designing complex layouts). The verification of the user input is done with very individual regular expressions. The admin can set Form field name, tooltip and default value and even let the default value be auto-cleared once the form field is activated. cForms II supports multi-page forms (which i didn’t use, though) and it can autoconfirm emails to the user (which i didn’t use either). Spam detection is done not only with the individual regular expressions, but also with a captcha-plugin or alternativey with a simple Q&A-field (like, ‘what color is snow?’). The possible questions for the Q&A field can be set manually. You can even backup and restore the form settings! Furthermore the admin can chose from a dozen css-layouts and manually change them.

Here are the other plugins, that i tried out:

• Contact Form 7: It didn’t seem to have a template tag, that i could use in the theme files.
• Form Builder: Very bad design. It features div-tags that are floated. If your design uses floating objects, it will break it or be broken itself!
• Scaleable Contact Form plugin: Nearly no option to verify the user input. Supports Captcha, but it uses the plugin “simple captcha” for that, which doesn’t seem to support wordpress 2.9.
• Spam-Free Contact Form: simply crap. don’t use that.
• Visitor Contact: only interesting, if you like using external web applications on your own blog.