Build a “Smart” Contact Form + Event Calendar That Doesn’t Suck

Good morning from a little RV report in Nakomis, Florida. The family and I took the new (to us) RV out for Memorial Day weekend. Let me just say this…

Going to the beach on Memorial Day weekend is not for the faint of heart. 🤣 The crowds are intense.

Anyway, wrapping up the newsletter while sipping coffee and sitting in the campsite. It doesn’t suck. 😍

In this issue, I want to give you some ideas with regard to your site’s contact form. Usually the form everybody creates and sticks on there and forgets about. But, if you think through it strategically, there are some cool things you can do.

Also, I’ve got a lot of clients with events calendars and they’re using the Event Calendar plugin. But, that plugin is a freakin’ beast (and not in a good way). I found an alternative. And I’ll tell you about it.

So, let’s dive in, shall we? 😇

Tips & Tricks With Your Contact Form

The boring little contact form on most websites is one of the most forgotten assets people have. Most people toss some simplistic contact form on there with little to no thought about the possibilities.

But, when you use a good forms plugin such as Fluent Forms, there’s more that you can do with that contact form than just pop off an email to your inbox.

For instance:

• Tag them as a lead in your CRM (like FluentCRM) based on things they say on the contact form, allowing you to send automated followups.
• Have the form help answer common questions before they ever hit submit
• Have the form scan for “buzz phrases” common to pitches and spammers and throw up extra protections if they are detected.

To give you an idea… my own contact form has a dropdown that asks “What is this concerning?”. Super simplistic. They will pick one of the options when filling out the contact form.

Now, let’s look at the power of conditional logic when it comes to Fluent Forms. Those capabilities are:

• Email Notifications. You can have multiple email notifications, each with conditional logic to send off emails to certain places only under certain criteria.
• Conditional Confirmations. This allows you to show people completely different messages when they submit the form depending on what they said in the form. Could be different messages, or routing people to different pages.
• Conditional Integrations. You can set up multiple integrations with a form, each which fire only under certain circumstances.
• Conditional Fields. You can show/hide fields on the form based on answers on other parts of the form.

Now, when you put this tech to use to execute strategy, some of the things I could do are:

• If a person says they’re sending me a message about Concierge or they say the word “concierge” in their message to me, I can tag them as a lead for Concierge in FluentCRM as well as send them to a different confirmation page which, perhaps, offers them an incentive to join Concierge right away.
• If a person says they’re interested in a potential project, I could show a conditional field for FluentBooking, allowing them to schedule a Roadmap call to discuss the project right there in the process of contacting me.
• If the message they try to send me contains certain spammy buzzwords common to pitch emails, I can make a checkbox appear that makes them attest to the fact they’re not trying to pitch me on something, ask for a guest post, or any of the other annoying crap I usually ignore anyway.
• If they choose that their concern is “My Account”, I can conditionally show them a “Custom HTML” field that would allow me to link to some common FAQ items that are common to account profiles. This could potentially alleviate the need for them to email me at all.

See, it comes down to analyzing the potential workflows and outcomes of that contact form and how you can make it a smart form.

When you really get right down to it, that contact form should be looked at as a landing page. The conversion (or the “sale”) is that they fill out the contact form. You want to fulfill that intention as quickly as you can.

And when they tell you things on that form, you can use automations and conditional capabilities on that form to actually make the form do work for you. To make that contact form serve it’s role in helping grow your business. This makes more send than yet another stupid form that does nothing but spit off to your email inbox.

What could you make YOUR contact form do for you?

This Week In Concierge

One of the core services I provide for clients in Concierge is to manage weekly updates for plugins, themes and WordPress core. I take care of it in order to ensure clients get access to new features, their sites stay secure, and they don’t need to waste time worrying about it.

But, every now and then, I have a client reach out to me to remind me of pending updates. They think things are getting too behind, so they send me a little “nudge”. 😇

That’s totally fine, but I also thought I would just go over how I manage these updates.

I use a tool called WP Remote to manage client sites and provide some core services. A tool like this is mandatory for somebody who does what I do, since I manage so many sites. I can’t keep track of them all without a tool.

Every Monday (usually early afternoon), WP Remote does an automatic series of updates across all sites. It uses full regression testing throughout to ensure nothing breaks. Then, later in the day or Tuesday, I go through things manually. Simply put, the automatic updates don’t always catch everything, so I give it the human touch as well.

So, every week, there’s a two-phase run through things. First, the automatic updates. Then, me going through and checking on what may have been missed to handle manually.

Why would an update fail to happen automtically? Happens all the time, actually. Common reasons are:

• Issues with the update servers.
• License issues or no license in place (often, I can still update it anyway but requires me to manually do it)
• Gremlins. 😜 Hey, sometimes tech is just…. tech. You know how it is. 😉

Now, timing being what it is, plugins are constantly releasing updates. And certainly, these updates keep on coming during the course of the week. This means that sometimes a client will log into their site and see pending updates. This doesn’t mean I forgot you. 😇 It just means there’s been a lot of updates since the last update run that I did on your site.

Clients always have the ability to update plugins on their own. Unlike some agencies, I never do anything to hinder a client’s ability to do anything to the website. So, you CAN update it. Or… you just just wait for me to get to it. I promise I will. 😇

And, of course, all clients can always feel free to ping me about it. Never feel odd about nudging me, if you want to make sure.

Alrighty then? Cool. 😎

WordPress Quick Bits

MetaBox Builder 5. I’ve never been a huge MetaBox user (which is weird because I own a lifetime license to it), but perhaps I should take a look at it again. MB Builder 5.0 is coming down the pike, with the release of their alpha version. A brand new interface is going to make working is going to make working with custom fields and custom forms look more like a page builder. Click here to check it out.

Bottom Of The Barrel. Mark Zahra raised concerns about product suggestions within WordPress, with a screenshot showing MonsterInsights cross-promoting the Envira Gallery plugin right within the block editor, with an option to install. Of course, both of these plugins are “WP Beginner Verified”, which means they are Awesome Motive products. This damn company is absolutely one of the worst when it comes to bags like this. They’re also the people who bought and ruined Thrive Themes. I avoid any plugin from that company if I can help it.

Oh, Hell Yeah!. A new “Fluent” product is forthcoming…. FluentAffiliate. Yes, they’re going to be releasing a new affiliate management plugin that will tightly integrate with the other Fluent products. I will, of course, be all over this thing. One of the top affiliate plugins out there right now is AffiliateWP, but it is another Awesome Motive product so I prefer not to use it. Plus, I really don’t like how AffiliateWP has a smorgasbord of add-on plugins for various things that really blimp up your plugin list. So, I’m going to love having a “go to” recommendation for affiliate programs and I have little doubt FluentAffiliate will be that solution.

WP Coupons Relaunched. WP Coupons was acquired awhile ago… and has now been relaunched for free. This is a cool little plugin intended for affiliate marketers to provide coupons for products as they click through your affiliate link. You’ve probably seen that kind of thing on coupon sites.

Ollie 2.0. The Ollie theme has launched version 2.0. Ollie is a very nice theme framework. Think of it like Kadence, but 100% built around full-site editing. I met the creator out at PressConf and super smart guy.

FluentBoards 1.6. In the arena of “Fluent” products, FluentBoards is sometimes forgotten. It is their task/project management system in Kanban board format. Think of it like Trello, but inside of WordPress and integrated into the rest of your tech stack. They just launched version 1.6, supporting sub-task groups, single board shortcodes, and more. Check out the details here.

Plugin Noise. The rise of AI tool usage creates a lot of noise and clutter out there when it comes to online content and courses. But, looks like it could be spreading to WordPress plugins, too, with an 87% rise in plugin submissions to the repository amid AI tools. It makes sense since AI definitely speeds up the process of development as well as opens it up to “vibe coders” who now don’t have to everything by hand. Unlike things like courses where AI is used to regurgitate (in my opinion), using AI to code really does make sense.

RapidPress. A new performance plugin for WordPress called RapidPress has been released. It looks to do the same kinds of things as all the others, but this one is free so that makes it sorta kinda maybe interesting. 🤣

Elementor Is Huge. When it comes to market share, Elementor has a whopping 12.4% total market share. As was said on an X post, “It’s mind-blowing to me that Elementor has a bigger market share than Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Framer, and Shopify combined.” And it is true.

An Events Calendar Plugin That Doesn’t Suck

A lot of sites have the need for an events calendar. Whether for local events, calls for students of a membership site, or something else.

And, all too often (and sadly), people end up using The Events Calendar. In fact, I just did a lookup of all the sites I manage for clients and I currently have TEN client sites using The Events Calendar.

But, I am most definitely not a fan of that plugin. Don’t get me wrong… it is incredibly capable. And it should be because this damn thing is a bloated beast. The core plugin is over 14MB while the Pro addon for it is 2.9MB. On top of that, it has an army of additional addon plugins for various other capabilities.

The Events Calendar is also expensive, if you ask me.

And it breaks sometimes. Anything this beefy is bound to be problematic… and it is. I’ve seen things break many times with this plugin. Even as of this writing, one of my client sites is repeatedly sending me notifications of fatal errors related to The Events Calendar. Weirdly, the thing still works on-site and no issues have been reported, but something is in there glitching and it has been for awhile.

So, I’m not a fan of the plugin. It requires way too much overhead for what should be a pretty simple feature. This is also a large reason why I didn’t have a calendar plugin in the Concierge Toolkit. I hadn’t yet found one that I would feel comfortable installing without the need to warn them first. 🤪 Plus, it would just lead to more headache.

There’s a much cleaner option, though…. and it is called Pie Calendar.

And get this, the entire plugin is only… 514KB. That’s it. It is literally about 3% of the size of the core Events Calendar plugin with the Pro addon. Holy crap!

But, it does that because it strips out all the bloat and bullcrap and just does what people WANT from a plugin like this…. the ability to post an event post and assign dates to it and have it show up on a calendar.

I mean, it SHOULD be so simple. But, somehow The Events Calendar needs some bloaty thing to do that… and Pie Calendar makes it simple.

One of the reasons Pie Calendar is so streamlined is because it only focuses on the core mission of a calendar plugin. It doesn’t try to do all of the things that you COULD do with other plugins you’re probably already using anyway.

For instance, instead of the core plugin doing fields such as location, speaker name and other things associated with an event, you can just use something like Advanced Custom Fields for that.

Instead of having all the forms built into the plugin, you can just use Fluent Forms.

Instead of having a big pile of proprietary CSS to give the whole thing some fancy style you might want to override anyway, Pie Calendar doesn’t get in the way. It does just the minimum to make it look fine, and reverts to your theme styles for everything else. If you want to customize the look of the calendar, it isn’t like it is hard to do.

If you want to sell tickets, just do it with WooCommerce or something. Why does the events plugin need to have that functionality?

You get the idea.

The result is a calendar plugin that is anything but overwhelming. It is very easy to use. It doesn’t break. It doesn’t slow down your website. I can’t imagine this thing having plugin conflicts with other things. Pie Calendar just works. That’s it.

If you need all the bells and whistles because you’re running a full-on events focused company, well by all means, go use The Events Calendar. But, most people don’t have the needs for something like that, so running with all the bloat for a simple calendar makes no sense.

I have acquired an agency license to Pie Calendar. It is now part of the Concierge Toolkit and available to all Concierge clients. All you have to do is ask and I’ll help you set it up.

And now finally, I have a solution in the Toolkit for clients that need an events calendar.

And, if you’re one of those 10 clients using the other one, we should talk. 😎