{"id":180,"date":"2013-12-07T03:12:56","date_gmt":"2013-12-07T03:12:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davedub.co.uk\/davedub\/wordpress\/?p=180"},"modified":"2014-08-09T10:15:41","modified_gmt":"2014-08-09T03:15:41","slug":"dd-contact-form","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/davedub.co.uk\/davedub\/wordpress\/dd-contact-form\/","title":{"rendered":"dd contact form"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>features<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>easy to use &#8211; works straight out of the box, just add shortcode<\/li>\n<li>easy initial set up &#8211; no registration<\/li>\n<li>integrated captcha options<\/li>\n<li>optionally request booking dates, additional questions or party sizes<\/li>\n<li>integrated custom css editor<\/li>\n<li>built in contact manager system<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>instructions and settings<\/h2>\n<p>The settings section is found on the WordPress menu (Settings -&gt; DD Contact Form) and contains four sections: General Settings, User Interface, Extra Information and Custom CSS.<\/p>\n<div id=\"accordion\">\n<h3>quick start<\/h3>\n<div>\n<p>Install and activate the plugin (instructions <a href=\"https:\/\/codex.wordpress.org\/Managing_Plugins\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>Type this shortcode where you want your contact form to appear:<\/p>\n<p>&#91;dd_contact_form&#93;<\/p>\n<p>The contact form will now appear on the page \/ post.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h3>settings &#8211; general settings<\/h3>\n<div>\n<p><strong>General Settings<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Set, edit or view email settings. View or change captcha settings in security settings section. Enable user details logging in privacy settings section.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Security<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Select captcha type: simple addition (default) or google reCaptcha. To use the Google reCaptcha, you will need to sign up and get private and public keys. Sign-up is extremely quick and easy &#8211; see <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/recaptcha\/admin\/create\">here<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Privacy<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Offer to save user permission to send newsletters or other updates in the future.<br \/>\nSave the IP address and geolocation information for each contact form user. Please ensure there are no legal issues using this in your area before enabling.<br \/>\nTo use the geolocation services, you will need to register with IPinfoDB to get a key. Registration is relatively straightforward &#8211; see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ipinfodb.com\/register.php\">here<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Email<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Set recipient email addresses for receiving contact form enquiries.<br \/>\nConfigure the sending of a confirmation email to the user once the system has received the form.<br \/>\nSpecify an image to display at the top of emails sent by the contact form. The URL should be in absolute format.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h3>settings &#8211; user interface<\/h3>\n<div>\n<p><strong>User Feedback<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There are two options in the user feedback section.<\/p>\n<p>Form sent action<\/p>\n<p>Once the user has successfully sent their message, you can either send them to a new page or display a thank you message on the current page. This section allows you to specify the custom thank you message and the url to jump to.<\/p>\n<p>Error Checking<\/p>\n<p>The form can be checked for errors in one of two ways. Either the form is checked on the fly, whereby users are shown a green tick or red cross beside each field, or the form is checked when the user presses the &#8216;Send&#8217; button. Note that the form data is effectively checked twice when the on the fly option is selected, as the form will always check the form data before sending in either case.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Appearance<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This section contains various options for controlling the look and feel of the contact form.<\/p>\n<p>Custom CSS Classes<\/p>\n<p>Note that there are at least two ways to specify css for the form and it&#8217;s elements; you can specify custom css classes supplied by your theme \/ child theme or you can use the Custom CSS editor (DD Contact From Settings, 4th tab). If you would prefer to specify custom classes you can do so here.<\/p>\n<p>Button Styling<\/p>\n<p>If your theme already applies appropriate styling to your contact form buttons then leave this option on the default (WordPress). However, if you&#8217;d like to use the jQuery-UI library to style your buttons, then select the jQueryUI option here.<\/p>\n<p>jQuery UI Theme<\/p>\n<p>Select a theme for jQueryUI widgets. The setting only affects the date pickers and buttons and the buttons are only affected if jQueryUI button styling is selected in &#8216;Button Styling&#8217;.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h3>settings &#8211; extra information<\/h3>\n<div>\n<p>You can request extra information from the contact form user. Each of the extra information types can be either obligatory or optional. If you only want to ask for these details on posts that are in a certain category, you can specify the category here.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dates &amp; Times<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>You may want to request a date or arrival \/ departure dates &#8211; for example a restaurant or hotel room booking. You can ask for arrival and \/ or departure dates on the contact form using these settings. Optionally, you can also ask for arrival \/ departure times.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Party Size<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If your contact form is being used to collect bookings, you may want to request the number of people &#8211; for example a restaurant or hotel room booking. You can ask for the number of adults and children on the contact form using these settings.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Additional Questions<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If you want to add extra questions for the user to answer you can specify them here.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h3>settings &#8211; css editor<\/h3>\n<div>\n<p>The built is CSS editor allows you to add custom CSS to the form. Once edited, the CSS can be updated immediately using the &#8216;Update CSS&#8217; button. You can also use the &#8216;Save Changes&#8217; button to update the CSS, but you&#8217;ll have to wait for WordPress to reload the entire page every time you make an edit.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Commonly styled classes<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>.ddcf_button<\/p>\n<p>This class will style the buttons on the form<\/p>\n<p>.ddcf_input_base<\/p>\n<p>This class will style all the text inputs on the form &#8211; name, email, subject and message. If the relevant fields are enabled in the settings, it will also style the simple add captcha, date\/time picker displays and extra question fields.<\/p>\n<p>.ddcf_dropdown<\/p>\n<p>This class will style the party size dropdowns (if enabled in the Extra Information section).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h3>contact manager<\/h3>\n<div>\n<p>The built in contact manager allows you to instantly recall details of people who have previously contacted you through the contact form. To do this, the contact form logs each contact form enquiry, along with metadata to the WordPress database. The details can then be retrieved using a page only accessible to users whom are both registered on the site (Administrator or Editor) and logged on).<\/p>\n<p>Using the manager page<\/p>\n<p>To use the manager page, create a new page and add the following shortcode:<\/p>\n<p>&#91;dd_manager_page&#93;<\/p>\n<p>Although the page is viewable only by registered users (Administrator or Editor), it is recommended that the page be published privately to provide two layers of protection for your client details.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n<h2>known issues \/ current bugs \/ planned features<\/h2>\n<h3>Possible WP-reCAPTCHA conflict<\/h3>\n<p>I received the following report regarding recaptcha compatibility:<br \/>\n<em>I\u2019ve noticed that the ReCaptcha built in to your DD Contact Form conflicts with the WP-reCAPTCHA plugin. If I disable the WP-reCAPTCHA plugin then your form works again.<\/em><br \/>\nStatus: under review<\/p>\n<h3>Default email address<\/h3>\n<p>On fresh install, the form defaults to sending form enquiries to the WP admin email address. However, in the forwarded message it contains instructions for setting the recipient of the form&#8217;s enquiries, and the plugin settings show no addresses. The plugin should set the admin email in the settings on install.<br \/>\nStatus: fix for next update<\/p>\n<h3>Widget Support<\/h3>\n<p>It&#8217;s not currently possible to place the form inside widget. Since the form already performs well in tight spaces, adding a dd contact form widget is under development for the next update.<br \/>\nStatus: fix for next update<\/p>\n<h3>captcha options<\/h3>\n<p>A very interesting article on captchas has inspired me to look at some creative alternatives &#8211; see here: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailydot.com\/technology\/end-captcha-security-top-five-alternatives\">5 CAPTCHA alternatives to replace your least favorite security tool<\/a>.<br \/>\nStatus: under review<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<h2>support<\/h2>\n<p>If you have any questions, suggestions or bugs to report, please use the DD Contact Form plugin discussion group <a href=\"https:\/\/groups.google.com\/forum\/#!forum\/dd-contact-form\">here<\/a> or use the WordPress forum <a href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.org\/support\/plugin\/dd-contact-form\">here<\/a>. Please don&#8217;t post support questions below, as I&#8217;m not in the habit of checking post comments that often&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<h2>about dd contact form<\/h2>\n<p>Whilst working on WordPress websites for friends, I found I was unable to find a free contact form plugin that had all the features I needed. The ones that came with themes I&#8217;d bought were not so good either, so I started making my own. After 18 months evolution, the plugin was ready. I decided to release it open source, as I feel I&#8217;ve benefited greatly from the community over the years. I hope you find it useful.<\/p>\n<p>\n<b>I&#8217;ve colsed comments on this post now, as too many people posted support requests here &#8211; please use the DD Contact Form plugin discussion group <a href=\"https:\/\/groups.google.com\/forum\/#!forum\/dd-contact-form\">here<\/a> or use the WordPress forum <a href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.org\/support\/plugin\/dd-contact-form\">here<\/a>.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>features easy to use &#8211; works straight out of the box, just add shortcode easy initial set up &#8211; no [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":408,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,44,14,17],"tags":[48,50,67,46,47,82,66,113,65,49,45],"class_list":["post-180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-developer","category-open-source","category-projects","category-webdev","tag-ajax","tag-bookings","tag-captcha","tag-contact-form","tag-davedub","tag-dd","tag-free","tag-open-source","tag-plugin","tag-simple","tag-wordpress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/davedub.co.uk\/davedub\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/davedub.co.uk\/davedub\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/davedub.co.uk\/davedub\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davedub.co.uk\/davedub\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davedub.co.uk\/davedub\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180"}],"version-history":[{"count":65,"href":"http:\/\/davedub.co.uk\/davedub\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":615,"href":"http:\/\/davedub.co.uk\/davedub\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions\/615"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davedub.co.uk\/davedub\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/davedub.co.uk\/davedub\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davedub.co.uk\/davedub\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davedub.co.uk\/davedub\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}