Monday, February 4th, 2008
Justin Tadlock has posted a way to use built-in WordPress comments in lieu of a contact form. Basically, you replace your theme’s current comments.php file with the one that Justin offers for downloading that checks if a page is called “Contact.” If it is, the comments stay hidden on that page. You can change the comments.php file so that other pages on your site will also hide comments.
Then you can create your contact page which will display the comment form, but any comment submissions will stay hidden.
The advantages:
- Don’t need to use another plugin
- Don’t need to tweak a plugin
- Can theoretically manage all contact form submissions from your site rather than via email.
The disadvantages:
- Submissions are actually comments, so they end up in your comment queue. If you have a lot of comments on your site, that can get hard to manage.
- if you ever change themes or your “comments.php” file, then your comments on your “Contact” page will no longer be private. This can be solved by deleting all of these types of comments, which I personally don’t like because I like to save letters from readers; or using this solution forever, which is kind of a long-term commitment.
It’s an interesting idea, and worth considering.
Even Simpler WordPress Contact Form
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Posted in Tips | Tags: comments, forms | 3 Comments »
Monday, December 31st, 2007
Urban Giraffe has a list of amazing plugins that the guy behind the site, John Godley, developed. Many of these plugins are really unique, and I haven’t seen anything like them anywhere else.
Here are the ones that I find most interesting, and I hope to try out soon:
- Filled In - Places a customized form on your site, and stores submitted data in a database. The plugin features email reporting, AJAX support, CAPTCHA support, and file uploads. The data can be exported to CSV or XML.
- Advanced Permalinks - If you decide midway to change your permalink structure to something friendlier, this generally means you have to do it sitewide and for all existing posts, which means redirecting everything. This plugin allows you to say “From now on, all posts will have permalink structure B, while posts until now will retain permalink structure A.” Can save a lot of headache.
- Search Unleashed - Makes searching WordPress blogs more user-friendly by adding the following features:
- Full text search with wildcards and logical operations
- Search posts, pages, comments, titles, URLs, tags, and meta-data (all configurable)
- Search data after it has been processed by plugins, not before
- Search highlighting of all searches, including titles and comments
- Search highlighting of incoming searches from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Baidu, and Sogou
- Search results show contextual search information, not just a post excerpt
- Record search phrases and display in a log
- Exclude specific posts and pages from results
- Compatible with WP-Cache
- Supports WordPress 2.0.5 through to 2.3
- No changes required to your theme
- User Permissions - Allows you to assign permissions to specific posts. This sounds like it could be good if you offer premium content on your site.
- Anti-Email Spam - Simple plugin to encode email addresses with either JavaScript or HTML entities and protect yourself against email harvesting scripts. I should have done something like this a loooong time ago.
See ‘em all at: Plugins - Goodies for WordPress | Urban Giraffe»
Posted in Plugins | Tags: forms, multi-user, permalinks, search | No Comments »
