How to create a WordPress contact form using the CRED plugin

By Neil on November 20, 2014

Your website needs a contact form and there are a few plugins out there that let you do this (for example see how I do it using Gravity Forms). Here I show you how to create a simple WordPress contact form using the CRED forms plugin, which is part of the Toolset suite of plugins by OnTheGoSystems.

The CRED forms plugin was created to primarily to give websites the ability to allow user generated content to be published on websites via front-end forms, thus eliminating the need to give dashboard access to anyone who wanted to submit content to your website. This is a fantastic feature and extremely useful for all sorts of websites. The question remains however, can CRED be used to create simple contact forms?

The answer is YES it can. The process is a little long winded but pretty straight forward. Essentially you need to create a form that creates new content (because that’s what CRED is designed for), but instead of publishing this content on your website you simply store a list of new posts in a special custom post type you have setup. This is easier than it may sound and I go through the entire process in this video tutorial.

So, in this WordPress tutorial I first create a new custom post type called Contact Forms using the free TYPES plugin, which is also part of the Toolset suite of plugins that includes CRED. Using the same TYPES plugin I create two custom fields and call them Email and Comments/Questions. This whole process literally takes about a minute to do.

Next I use the CRED plugin to setup a new form and configure it to create new Contact Forms posts when it is submitted. I also setup an email notification system so that I get an email every time the form is submitted. Again this is a very quick process and there is a walk through wizard to follow along too. I then create a new page and embed this CRED form into it.

The form looked OK but I wanted to do a little bit of styling just to make it look a bit better. This involved identifying the CSS Classes of the different form fields (I used the Inspect element function in the Chrome browser to do this – again I show all this in the video), and then using the great built in CSS editor window in CRED I apply some simple styling. Basically I set a margin-top and a margin-bottom to pull the fields closer to the titles I setup and also push the next title a bit further away.

That’s it, you now have a contact form with email notifications setup using the CRED forms plugin. Like I said the process is a little long winded but with all forms plugins for WordPress there is some setup so comparably it is not much more time consuming than any other plugin.

CRED is a paid plugin that can be purchased alone or as part of the Toolset suite of plugins. Check out more on the Toolset website here.