Dagon Design Form Mailer

First of all, I would sincerely like to thank the author, I believe his name is Matt, for this wonderful plugin. I want to give him credit for writing this amazing script and offering it to us all. You can find his complete instructions and download information at his website here.

Let me put it like this, this contact form plugin simply rocks. The Secure Form Mailer Plugin for WordPress from Dagon Design in my experience is the best contact form plugin out there for self hosted wordpress installs in terms of implementation, ease of use, and my personal favorite, customization. Matt has included some awesome features such as the ability to save input field information directly to a file in your server hosting account, the option for file attachments in the form emails, IP address and time/date stamp recording, and several methods of verification to drastically reduce and almost eliminate damn form spammers. These are just some of the features available in this dynamic form wordpress plugin.

So you get the idea, I really like his work. Also, as a note, be sure to check out his other plugins as well, especially the Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress which can be found here. And, before I continue to the reason I am writing this article, Matt has supplied not only the wordpress version of his secure form mailer plugin, but a straight up bad ass php version!

Ok, now for the goods, the only complaint I have about Dagon Design is the lack of some sort of forum for help and maintenance issues. He basically uses traditional wordpress post commenting as his support forum and with over 1,500 comments, questions are not easily resolved. That is what this post is about, one of the issues many people seem to have is the lack of some sort of phone validation for this contact form. So, I have taken it upon myself to customize his plugin for my needs and offer up my revised version. Below are the major changes and additions I have made to Dagon Design Secure Form Mailer for WordPress plugin.

• added a “min” parameter: Matt intelligently included the “max” parameter to limit the number of characters a user is able to input in a form field without returning an error, the “min” parameter functions in exactly the same way. The user must enter at least a specified amount of characters for the form to not return an error.
• added a “numbers” variable: This is something I came up with on my own. This variable applies strictly to the text input field for use in the “ver” parameter. Essentially what this does is force a user to only be able to input numbers 0 through 9 in to a particular text input field. Meaning, if a user enters any uppercase or lowercase letter, any special character, or leaves a blank space in an input field with the |ver=numbers| parameter, the form will return an error.
  
  NOTE: These two additions were added for a simple means to verify a properly formatted 10 digit phone number or 5 digit zip code in an input field. These two additions are not inclusive and were written for my needs. I basically wanted a phone input formatted like 5551231234 and a zip code formatted like 12345, where the input field would only accept numbers 0-9 and with the “min” parameter would specify the exact amount of numbers needed to be input, such as 10 for phone and 5 for zip code. (for more extensive phone and zip validation, I believe there is a php PEAR library to actually verify phones by area code and prefix and zip code by actual zip code, I believe it will also allow for various input formats such as (555) 555 5555, 555-555-5555, etc.)
• added option to add host name to file on server: This is something I did because as you may have guessed, if you saw the feeds on the right sidebar of this page, I own two list companies and sell telemarketing and mailing lists for a living. I actually use this form to compile data from several of my landing page sites. So, logically, when compiling responder type data, the more information you can gather on a consumer as they respond to an offer, the better and more marketable that file becomes. Basically, in the wordpress admin options page for an instance of the dagon design form mailer, I have added a check box which gives you the option of including host name in the file on the server. A screen shot of the additional option in the admin options page and a screen shot of what the files I compile look like are below.

click the images for a larger view

So that is the extent of what I have done to modify this awesome plugin. Please refer to the Dagon Design website linked above for the full documentation and don’t be shy to give Matt a small donation because his plugin’s for sure require a lot of time and effort. If you would like my modified version or have any questions on my experience with the Dagon Design Secure Form Mailer for WordPress just drop me a line below and I would be more than happy to send you a link for download and help out!