Building Your First Form
A 5-minute walkthrough to publish a working contact form.
1. Create a new form
- In WordPress admin, go to Form Plant → Add New
- Enter a form name (e.g.
Contact)
2. Add fields
In the Fields tab, add the fields you need. A typical contact form looks like this:
| Label | Field Type | Required |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Text | ✅ |
| ✅ | ||
| Phone | Phone | |
| Message | Textarea | ✅ |
Each field opens a modal for detailed configuration. Drag and drop to reorder.
See Field Types for the full list of supported field types.
3. Configure email notifications
In the Form Settings → Email tab, configure the admin notification email and the auto-reply email.
- Admin notification email — sent to the site operator when a submission is received
- Auto-reply email — sent to the submitter (using the value of the Email field)
In the email body, use field names wrapped in curly braces to insert submitted values:
{Name} ← inserts the value of the field named "Name"
{Email} ← inserts the value of the field named "Email"
See Form Settings for details.
4. Configure confirmation screen and post-submit action
- Confirmation screen — toggle whether to show a confirmation step before submitting
- Post-submit action — choose between Message / Custom HTML / Redirect
5. Embed on a page
Method A: Block editor (recommended)
- Open a page or post in the editor
- Add the Form Plant block from the block inserter
- Pick the form you just created from the dropdown
- Publish the page
Method B: Shortcode
In the classic editor or any text-based context, use:
[fplant id="1"]
id is the form ID shown on the Form Plant list screen.
6. Verify
- Open the published page in a browser
- Fill out the form and submit
- Confirm the confirmation screen → success message flow works as expected
- Confirm the notification email arrives at the configured address
- Open Form Plant → Submissions in WordPress admin to view the saved entry
Next Steps
- Form Settings — Email and post-submit details
- Spam Protection — Once spam starts arriving
- HTML Template — Fine-grained layout control
- External Site Embedding — Embed outside WordPress