WP Content Form

The installation of the WP Contact Form is really easy for most people who have themes based of early themes. The problem that a lot of people are going to have is this contact form will not look right for your wordpress theme. It is likely that you are going to need to customize the contact form and to work on your page.

This is not a plugin (yet) that is loaded from the wp-admin side of your wordpress site. It is a meant to act as a separate page that runs at your root directory of your wordpress installation.

This readme will hopefully guide you through the process of editing the necessary files to get it working on your site. If you are still having problems see the Support section at the bottom.

If you get a version of this contact form working on your site for a different theme please Email me so that I can add your version to this distribution.

Requirements

This contact form uses PHP to do the form processing and error checking. You must have PHP 4.4 or greater. It will probably work with releases earlier releases, but I haven't tested it myself to verify this. Most hosting companies are going to have newer versions of PHP due to the security fixes.

You will need to be running some form of Linux or BSD, because well this is what the script is written for and I'm not sure that it work on windows. Plus ask any sane server guy and they will tell you that Linux servers use less system resources are more secure and cost less. Sounds like common sense to me. Apache runs roughly 75% of the websites on the world wide web and well you figure that it is for a good reason. The script will probably run on IIS or another server program, but I wouldn't recommend it.

You will need to be running wordpress, of course, since this is meant to work with wordpress. You will also need to be running a standard theme or a theme based of a standard theme. If you wrote some custom job that doesn't use standard wordpress functions to call your header, footer and sidebar than this script will probably not work. Then again if you have a completely custom job you will probably know how to take what I have done and make it work for you.

Installation

The first step is going to be figuring out what version of the contact form looks the best for your theme.

  1. Connect to your website via FTP/SSH
  2. Download all the files for current theme you are using
  3. Open the style.css in a text editor
  4. Add the following code anywhere in style.css:
    .wpcontact {
    	float: left;
    	padding: 0 0 20px 45px;
    	margin: 0px 0 0;
    	width: 450px;
    }
    
  5. Upload style.css into the theme folder
  6. Upload all the contact-`version`.php files into the root folder of your wordpress installation
  7. Open all three in a web browser

If ONE of the contact-`version`.php forms looks okay on your site

  1. Rename that version of contact-`version`.php to contact.php
  2. Open up contact.php in a text editor
  3. Fill in your email address where indictated (~Line 42)
    Change: $emailTo = '';
    To:     $emailTo = 'your@email.com';
    
  4. Connect to your website via FTP/SSH
  5. Upload contact.php the root folder of your wordpress installation
  6. If your wordpress is not on the root directory of your website you will need change the path of ('./wp-blog-header.php') (line 23) to point to that file. It is located normally in the root directory of your wordpress installation.

If NONE of the contact-`version`.php forms looks okay on your site

Don't forget to please email me the resulting file that you made for your theme so that I can add that version to this distribution. Deleting your email address from the contact.php and letting me know what theme you are using would be very helpful.

Support

Please email me Logan Lindquist if you have any questions or comments on this script. If you are having wordpress problems I can try and help or you can try asking on the wordpress support site.

I will not customize this contact form for your site for free! Contact me and we can negotiate a fair price for my time. One of the example contact forms should work on your site. If they don't than ask for help online or pay me to get it done right.

WP Contact Form Copyleft © 2006 Logan Lindquist