Justin Tadlock

I’ve been scouring the WordPress plugin pages, other blogs, and the Web in general looking for a decent contact form that works with WordPress. Nope, not a one to be found.

Well, I’m sure there is one, but I haven’t found it yet.

Every plugin I found was easy to implement, but didn’t seem to flow seamlessly with WordPress. I was looking for something that would take minimal stylesheet changes, and pretty much performed like the comments form on blog posts.

I got everything from horribly aligned tables to plugins that had all the bells and whistles of a toddler’s Christmas morning. I wanted simplicity, so I decided to implement an idea I had a while back. Just use the normal comments form to allow people to contact me.

Basically, what I’ve done is delete a few things from the normal “comments.php,” and renamed it “contact-comments.php.” Then, I put together a page template called Contact (contact.php). With this technique, no comments show on the contact page, but they show in my WordPress dashboard. You can currently see what it looks like on my contact page.

Before going further, I must mention that I haven’t tested this with comment plugins that pull in the latest comments or anything. So, if you’re using something like that, I wouldn’t suggest this. Also, this probably isn’t the ideal solution for people who get a lot of emails through their contact form every day — it could become an organization disaster.

If you want to use this method (although I don’t recommend it and am still looking for a decent contact plugin), the first thing you need to do is download the Simple Contact Page (415). Unzip it to your “/wp-content/themes/current-theme” file.

Now, you need to create a WordPress page called “Contact” or “Contact Me” or whatever. In the right sidebar you will see a drop-down list under “Page Template.” Choose “Contact.” At the top of the right sidebar, under “Discussion,” uncheck the box marked “Allow Pings.” Now save your work and you’re done.

Easy and simple, but that’s about all you can get out of this method. I’m sure there are some other methods we could use to separate the comments left on our contact pages, but I’m not interested in building that, unless I can’t find a decent contact plugin.

Yes, I should probably be spending my time working on quality content for this blog and not being lazy and posting something like this, but maybe someone would actually like to use this.

So, any good contact form plugins? Something that doesn’t require a lot of work on my part? Something that looks, feels, and plays as nice as the WordPress commenting system?