If you have a WordPress blog, an old fashioned mailto: link should be a thing of the past. Besides making your site that much more vulnerable to spam bots, it just screams 1998! So if you haven’t done so yet, ditch that mailto: link and try out one of the many easy to use and feature-rich contact form plugins available for WordPress.

Original WP-ContactForm by Ryan Duff

This is the original WP-ContactForm plugin created by Ryan Duff. It has survived many incarnations of WP, but has suffered a bit lately with spam attacks. For that reason, Douglas Karr has dusted it off and spiffed it up, adding a user-customizable challenge question designed to further thwart spambots.

Douglas Karr’s New & Improved WP-ContactForm Plugin

In addition to serving up the functionality of Ryan Duff’s original plugin, and the aforementioned challenge question, Doug has also added the ability to add an unlimited number of dropdown optionsets to further narrow down the subject of the contact. This is great if your WP-based web site has different departments or like us, you want to know whether they are inquiring about a new project, reporting a bug or telling you how much they adore your new site design! :) Most importantly, this plugin has been made more secure as it actually ensures that it is not cross-site scripting capable. Something to think about when you are working with PHP. Script kiddies, be gone!

Paul Bain’s E-Form

This is an elegant plugin that you may want to use in tandem with Doug Karr’s contact form. Use WP-ContactForm for your generic contact page. Use the more powerful E-Form for more specific contact pages. It ships with a PDF file that contains all the instructions you’ll need to set up your custom form. You can use the input, textarea and select form elements. Unfortunately, radio buttons are not yet supported; I hope there is room for that in this plugin’s future. This form can be deployed on any WordPress “Page.”

WordPress-Ready Contact Form by Mike Jolley & Mike Cherim

This is by far the most thorough of the available contact form plugins. It has an extensive online option and configuration panel and is basically foolproof — it nags you if you’ve left out a critical bit of information during the configuration phase. It is amazingly secure, with “16 individual abuse countermeasures.” It ships with stylesheets for some of the more popular WordPress themes, such as Green Marinee, Blix, Default (Kubrick) and Classic, and a few others. It also has a custom.css stylesheet that you can use to customize the form to your own design.

Chip Cuccio’s Contact Form ][

Don't know why the ][ in the plugin name; perhaps Chip will come along soon to explain. This is a basic drop-and-go contact form plugin much like the one Ryan Duff created. It does promise more robust spam protection and a lot of security. From reading Chip's web site, he appears to be a hard core geek so if he says it’s secure, I believe him. This plugin can be used on a WordPress Page or in a WordPress blog entry.

Enhanced Contact Form

Joost de Valk has created an enhanced version of Ryan Duff’s contact form. Joost has added the ability to see referer links and, if the referer is a search engine, the keywords used to arrive at your contact form. Joost also adds the ability for the commenter to email a copy of the contact info to himself. And .. more spam protection. Nice work, Joost!

Wil Rushmer’s Contact Form for WordPress

Wil has gone the extra mile when creating this plugin. It has two components. Uniquely, during configuration, you give it a keyword string. Thereafter, anytime you type this keyword into a WordPress Page or entry (or anywhere else on your WP site for that matter), the plugin will automatically create a link to your Contact page! And you can set up your contact page any way you like, using the default page template or a custom template of your own. And it can be easily customized via your stylesheet as Wil has provided the style hooks that his plugin uses. An excellent example of a plugin author thinking outside the box to create a feature that makes using this plugin a breeze!