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Create Any Type of Form You Like on Your WordPress Site

A few weeks ago, I was building a site for an author. WordPress covered all her requirements except for one: a page where visitors could write testimonials that would show up on the site. WordPress has tons of "form" plugins, but I couldn't find any that would allow me to republish the data from the forms on to the site. I was about to give up the hunt and write a plugin of my own when I came across one that does just that: Formidable!

Formidable

Formidable is a plugin that makes it dead simple to create almost any kind of form. You can drag and drop fields into your form and customize its looks with the in-place editor, and your form will be ready in no time. You don't even need to know what HTML and CSS mean to use this plugin.

When the form is ready and visitors have written in it, you can login as the admin and manage the registrations. Formidable can replace a multitude of other plugins that you use to display user-entered information such as testimonials, polls, surveys and contact forms (of course!).

Enough said. Now, let's use Formidable.

Setting Up Formidable

You install Formidable just like you would any other WordPress plugin. Log in to the admin panel and click to "Add New" Plugins. Search for "Formidable Forms" and then install and activate the plugin. When activated, you will find a new tab in the left column titled "Formidable."

Formidable comes in two versions: Formidable (which is free) and Formidable Pro (priced at US $35). When compared to Formidable Pro, Formidable is, understandably, a little restrictive. You can use only the basic fields, and every time a visitor submits the form, you will be emailed the filled-out form. It doesn't get stored in the database for you to review later or to display it on your site. If this restriction is acceptable to your task at hand, you don't need to upgrade.

The features that set Formidable Pro apart from its counterparts, such as conditionally showing certain fields and displaying the results on your site, make it definitely worth every penny. For the remainder of this article, I will explain the features assuming that you have purchased Formidable Pro.

To sign up for a Formidable Pro membership, you have to visit the signup page on their website. You have to choose a username and password for your account. After signing up, come back to the Admin panel, click on "Formidable Pro," and enter your username and password. After you save it and the page reloads, you will find that three new pages have come up under the Formidable section. You are now ready to build forms for your website.

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