If you use a hosted WordPress.Com blog, short codes have been added to simplify many of the common tasks a blogger needs to deal with. Previously, we dealt with How to Add a Photo Gallery for self hosted blogs. In today’s entry, we will show you how easy it is to add a simple Contact form to your WordPress.Com blog.

The Contact Us short code can be used in Posts, Pages or in a text Widget if your theme is capable of customizing widgets.

Step 1
Select any Post or Page to edit, or select the Text Widget and add it to your specified Widget area

Step 2
Position the cursor where you want your Contact form to start

Step 3
Type in “[contact-form]” and save the post, page or widget.

Now go preview the a page or post on your blog and you should see a contact form displayed where you typed in the short code.

When you setup your blog, you probably provided an email address on the Settings => General page. If not, make sure you put a valid email address in this field and save your changes. When a user fills in the form and click on the submit button, an email is sent the email address specific on this Options page.

However, there are other options that you can provide to over ride default settings of the contact form:

Insert a Contact Form and send to one or more email addresses:
[contact-form to="your@email.com"]
[contact-form to="your@email.com,another@email.com,onemore@email.com"]

Setting a Subject:
[contact-form subject="My Message Subject"]

Allowing the User to Define their own subject:
[contact-form show_subject="yes"]

Contact Form Items to Understand

• User details are based on information they enter and can be valid (if logged in) or anonymous (if NOT logged in)
• Your email address will remain hidden to all visitors
• Only one Contact Form per post, page or text widget, but you can have multiple text widgets

We are currently working on our next post for more advanced WordPress users on adding a Contact Form short code to your existing WordPress theme.

Stay tuned!

Related posts:

1. WordPress: Sticky Posts
2. Creating Your own WordPress Plug-in and Widget
3. Hidden Gallery Shortcode for WordPress

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Sometime during the night while I was sleeping, WordPress released an update – WordPress 3.0. I have spent some of the morning messing around with it and the new features.

My consensus – Refreshing!

Among some of my first impressions are is a more simple looking administration area, which seems to load quicker and with less overhead on my servers.

I have also looked at the new theme that is installed with the update and I am really eager to dive into it further to understand how the new version will enhance the user experience.

More to come as we continue to put the new version through it’s paces.

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1. What is a WordPress Child Theme?
2. Have iPhone, will Blog
3. Adding a Simple Contact Us Form to WordPress

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*** Updated ***

Well, ok … it’s not a hidden tag, but it is a feature many of us aren’t aware of in WordPress.

I have seen many people on Twitter asking for a good Gallery plug-in for WordPress. Our choice for a plug-in would be NextGen. But, it occurred to me that many people don’t realize that WordPress has this feature built in already. It’s not the prettiest or the coolest gallery I have seen. But it does the job in a pinch.

The setup for a gallery is very easy. And inserting it into a post or page is done with a “shortcode”.

First, start a new post and give it a title. Then, using the Media Toolbar, add in your images. The Media Toolbar is that row of icons just above the editing area start with “Upload/Insert”. Click on the first icon to open the Media Uploader.

I have trouble with the Flash Uploader so I use the Browser Uploader.

I upload my image, and select the options I want for that image. DO NOT click on “Insert into Post”. ONLY click on the “Save all changes” button. Your image will then be added to the Gallery and this will be reflected in the Media windows tabs.

Add as many pictures as you want, always clicking on “Save all changes”. You will see the number of images in your gallery increase. After uploading and clicking the correct button to save, you are always taken to the gallery tab. After you have uploaded you last image, select the option you want for your gallery. When you’re finished, click on “Insert Gallery”.

You should now see a Gallery shortcode appear in your post similar to the following:
[gallery link="file" orderby="post_name"]

You can also assign your own tags for enclosing the various elements of the image gallery. I have select tags to enclose my items, thumbnails and captions.
[gallery link="file" orderby="post_name" itemtag="div" icontag="span" captiontag="p"]

Here is my result (courtesy of Matt Stuart):

There is more about this shortcode in the WordPress Codex.

Update: We have found a Lightbox plugin for this WordPress Gallery code as well. You can get the plugin here. We have been very pleased with this plug-in as it gives your site that extra needed level of professionalism for photo galleries in WordPress. Have a look at our implementation of this WordPress Lightbox Gallery Plug-in.

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One of the more complex issues with WordPress occurs when you need to customize the look and the feel.

This is complex because, in the past, a blog owner needed to understand some of the PHP code in a WordPress theme before they could begin to make any custom changes. The process usually involves finding a theme that you like, and then changing as little as possible for the desired look.

Using WordPress Child Themes makes the customization process much easier.

I found out about this feature while doing some research on WordPress Theme Frameworks, which will be a topic for a future date. The process to setup a Child Theme is simple.

Step 1 – create a directory in the /Theme/ directory of your blog with the name of your theme (i.e. – /themes/mytheme/).

Step 2 – in your new directory, create a file called ‘style.css’

Step 3 – add the following lines of code to your newly created style.css file:

/*
Theme Name: Rose
Theme URI: the-theme's-homepage
Description: a-brief-description
Author: your-name
Author URI: your-URI
Template: use-this-to-define-a-parent-theme--optional
Version: a-number--optional
*/

Note the line in bold text. This is the key. Change the value for Template from “use-this-to-define-a-parent-theme–optional” to the directory name of the WordPress theme you will be using as a template — or Parent Theme. So if you are using a Theme such as Arthemia as a Parent theme, the Template line would look as follows:

Template: arthemia

Step 4 – Now we want to import the styles from the Parent Theme by adding only 1 line to our Child Theme style.css.

@import url(../arthemia/style.css);

If you have a look at your blog now, it should look exactly like your Parent Theme. What you’ve just done is created a safe work space to make changes to the Parent Theme without touching any of the original theme files.

Now you are ready to begin adding CSS styling to your style.css file to customize your Child Theme. Any style declarations that you make to the style.css file in your Child theme will over ride those from the Parent Theme.

If you still need to make changes to the theme files, simply copy the Parent Theme template file to your Child Theme directory and make the edits. WordPress will look in the Child Theme directory first for template files. If an alternate version of a template file exists, WordPress will use that template file instead of the file in the Parent Theme directory.

For more on this topic, have a look at the WordPress Codex. We would also like to thank the people over at ThemeShaper for the inspiration behind this article.

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1. What's in a Theme
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Recently, I had some difficulty implementing forms into my blog here. So I set out on a mission to locate an easy to use plug-in to get forms into my blog.

The result exceeded my expectations by a long shot. I stumbled upon the cforms II plug-in for WordPress by Delicious Days.

But let me back up a bit and describe what I was looking for. I wanted something that could create forms that had a Web 2.0ish look and feel. I did not want to deviate too much from my blog theme and wanted full control of the CSS. The forms had to be easy to create and edit. These same forms also had to be easy to integrate into a blog post or page. I did not want a single form for everything, but a variety of forms that I could implement where I saw the need. And the kicker … I wanted to track and store all form submissions in a database so I could identify where feedback was coming from and how I was responding to my visitors.

Given this list of requirements, cforms II did not disappoint.

Immediately after installing the plug-in, I felt a bit confused by the interface provided in the admin panel. But after creating my first form from scratch, the purpose of each of the configuration sections became easily understandable.

I must admit, at first I just integrated the default form into the Contact Us page to see how it would look. From here I went straight into the styling tab to mess with the look and feel. My only disappointment was that after 15 minutes there was nothing left to fool with. I had my Contact form and it worked. Usually things are a bit more difficult than this … or aren’t they supposed to be?

Next task, create a form so that visitors can get a free quotation of our services. This provided a bit more of a challenge and took 20 minutes.

In about a half an hour I had created 2 forms, integrated them into my blog, and sent myself two test posts to ensure that everything worked fine.

I then realized that this was the way things were supposed to work. As described and planned … intuitively … the way humans normally think.

My bottom line is, if you are looking to implement one or more forms into your blog, there is nothing better than cforms II. I have recommended the plug-in to others and they have also been extremely satisfied with the results.

We hope you feel the same way after installing this very well designed plug-in.

Related posts:

1. Creating Your own WordPress Plug-in and Widget
2. WordPress: Sticky Posts
3. Adding a Simple Contact Us Form to WordPress

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