Passion for God is a network of people who work to equip God’s people for works of service and their website runs on WordPress! Paul Cook let us know about the site. It’s using the Paradigm Premium WordPress Theme available through ThemeForest. They’re also using EventBrite and WuFoo forms, two 3rd party solutions we wrote about a couple weeks ago here and here.
Previously I highlighted some options for adding contact forms to your church website. In this post I’ll share some options for forms that are for much more than contact, including sign up forms for event registration and any other use that’s more complex than a standard contact form.
Solutions that were mentioned in the previous post about contact forms that are also great solutions for sign up forms include Gravity Forms, Google Forms and WuFoo forms. Here are some other options.
WORDPRESS PLUGINS
Event Registration plugin is specifically designed for this purpose and does a good job. It has the ability to direct users to a payment site such as PayPal, Google Pay, Monster Pay, or Authorize.net.
Event Espresso Lite is the free version of Event Espresso, a comprehensive event management solution for WordPress. However, it’s not cheap as the cheapest version is $89.95. If you’re planning on using event registration heavily this would be worth it. Check out the Lite version first as it may have all you need.
3RD PARTY OPTIONS
Eventbrite is a popular third party event registration solution that also works with WordPress via the Eventbrite for the Events Calendar plugin.
Most church websites need to have some type of contact form on them. Contact forms allow you to give people a way to contact you without listing email addresses on the website. If you do put email addresses on your site, you’ll want to protect them. Even if you do, you may want contact forms on your site as well. Here are some options that are out there.
WORDPRESS PLUGINS
Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress. It’s extremely customizable but it is not easy to use for anyone who doesn’t have HTML experience. I try to avoid using it for church websites I design because of how complex it is unless the client knows HTML or has used it before and prefers it.
Custom Contact Forms is another plugin that is far more user friendly than Contact Form 7. It is very customizable as well, and the more extensible something is the more complex it becomes to use. Custom Contact Forms has a pretty good balance though and most users should be able to create and modify a form to add to the site. In designing for a client, I would set the CSS for them which simplifies things even more.
Gravity Forms is a premium WordPress plugin you can buy if you want something that has the best of everything mentioned above along with a ton of extra features. Gravity Forms integrates with a number of other web applications such as PayPal, MailChimp and others. Add-on plugins for Gravity Forms are also available to help it integrate with even more applications.
3RD PARTY OPTIONS
Google Forms are a great option for putting forms on your website. It’s included in the Google Docs suite. When you create a form Google creates a spreadsheet to store the entries. When people fill out the form you can choose to be notified by email of a new entry. You can integrate the form into your WordPress site easily using the Google Forms Shortcode plugin. Sometimes you’ll want to embed the code yourself so you can lose the standard formatting.
WuFoo is another great 3rd party premium forms option. Personally, I like the way WuFoo forms look the most and they provide the best usability in creating forms and managing entries. WuFoo integrates with a ton of other web applications I love to use including Twitter, MailChimp, Highrise, and others. It integrates with WordPress through the WuPhooey plugin.
Both Google Forms and WuF0o are great options for forms that are designed for more than just contact. I’ll write about that in the next post.
