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📖 User Guide: Plugin Overview

Contact Form (Lead Capture) ​

The Contact Form plugin is your primary tool for gathering leads, inquiries, and support requests directly from your visitors. It provides a secure, stylish front-end form and a robust back-end dashboard for managing all incoming messages.

What Does It Do? ​

  1. Renders Forms Securely: Creates a beautiful, theme-matching contact form anywhere on your site.
  2. Centralizes Leads: Stores every submission safely in your Waravel database.
  3. Instant Notifications: Sends an immediate email alert to your team whenever a new message arrives.

1. Setting Up the Form ​

Before you place the form on your site, you should configure its behavior and security settings.

  1. Navigate to Plugins > Contact Form in your dashboard.
  2. Click on the Settings (⚙️) tab.
  3. Recipient Email: Enter the primary email address where you want to receive notifications (e.g., [email protected]).
  4. Success Message: Customize the text visitors see after they click "Submit" (e.g., "Thank you! We will reply within 24 hours.").
  5. Design Styles: Waravel offers pre-built aesthetics to match your site:
    • Modern: Clean lines, floating labels.
    • Minimal: Understated, elegant input fields.
    • Classic: Traditional boxed inputs.
  6. Spam Protection: We highly recommend enabling the built-in Captcha to prevent automated bots from flooding your database with junk mail.

2. Embedding the Form on Your Site ​

You can place the contact form almost anywhere using a Shortcode.

  1. Copy the shortcode: [waravel-contact-form]
  2. Open the Page Editor for your desired page (e.g., "Contact Us").
  3. Paste the shortcode directly into the standard text editor.
    • Alternatively, if using the Waravel Builder, paste the shortcode inside a "Rich Text" block.
  4. Widgets: You can also paste this shortcode inside a Text Widget to display the form globally in your sidebar or footer.

3. Managing Your Leads (The Inbox) ​

When a visitor submits the form, you don't just get an email—the message is securely stored in your dashboard.

  1. Go to the main Contact Form Dashboard.
  2. You will see a list of all Submissions, acting as your site's internal inbox.
  3. Status Tracking: New messages are marked as Unread (highlighted in bold). Once you click to view a message, its status changes to Read.
  4. Detailed View: Clicking a message shows you the sender's Name, Email, Subject, and the full Message body.
  5. Security Insights: Waravel automatically logs the IP address and Browser info of the sender. This is crucial for identifying abusive users or spam patterns.
  6. Archiving: You can select older messages and use the Bulk Action menu to delete them and keep your inbox clean.

Best Practices for Lead Generation ​

  • Keep It Simple: The default form asks for Name, Email, Subject, and Message. Don't crowd the page with unnecessary text around the form; let the form be the primary focus.
  • Test Your Notifications: Once you configure your Recipient Email, go to your public site and send a test message. Check your inbox (and spam folder) to ensure the server is routing the email correctly.
  • Strategic Placement: While having a dedicated "Contact Us" page is standard, placing the form in the footer of a high-traffic "Services" page can significantly increase conversion rates.