Having a contact form on your site is a simple way to help your visitors reach you. There’s no need to hunt for an email address or bring up an email app if you have a contact form handy.
If you’re looking for a forms solution that can keep up with your business, then Formidable Forms is worth checking out. It comes with so many features that the read me file suggests grabbing a cup of coffee before going through the entire list.
Now, what if you want to use Formidable Forms to register WordPress users to your site? And, you’re not thrilled about yet another add-on that supports only one plugin. We’ve got a solution for you.
In this article, you’ll learn how to use the Uncanny Automator Pro plugin to create a user registration form with your Formidable Forms.
Before starting
Creating a registration form requires a recipe that can add a new WordPress user. This feature is available on the Pro and Agency pricing plans.
If you need to brush up on the terminology, please read about recipes, triggers, and actions.
There are two parts to the process. The first part is to build our form so we can gather the registration input. The second is to make our recipe (triggers and actions) that will register the user in WordPress.
Build the form
1. From your /wp-admin/ dashboard, navigate to Formidable > Add New.
A list of templates appears.
2. Select the Contact Us template.
3. Enter “Formidable – Simple Registration Form” for the Form Name.
4. Click the Create button.
The form builder displays.
5. Delete the Subject and Message fields.
6. Click the Update button at the upper right of the page.
7. Click on the top Settings tab.
8. Click on Styling & Buttons located on the left menu bar.
9. Change the form’s Submit Button Text to “Register”.
10. Click the Update button again.
Your form builder should look similar to this:
Now that you have a form, you can add it to a page using the shortcode. If you’re using Gutenberg, search for the Formidable Forms block. Your form should look something like this:
Well done! We’re ready to move on to the second part.
Create the recipe
1. From your wp-admin dashboard, navigate to Uncanny Automator > Add New.
2. Select Everyone for the recipe type.
This needs to be for everyone because we want to create a new WordPress user. Logged-in users cannot create new users.
3. Click Confirm.
Learn more about Recipes for Everyone.
4. Name your recipe “Simple registration form using Formidable Forms”.
5. Select Formidable Forms for the integration.
Note: We can only have one trigger for a recipe that runs for everyone.
6. For the trigger, select A Formidable Form is submitted.
7. For the form, choose our Formidable – Simple Registration Form that we made in part 1.
8. Click Save.
That’s it for the trigger. Next up, the action.
9. Next, select New User for Actions will be run on...
You should now see a form displaying the standard WordPress user account fields: first name, last name, email, username, display name, password, and roles.
For the first four fields, we want to grab the data from our Formidable Forms form. Let’s do the first name together.
10. Click on the asterisk icon (*) on the right-hand side of the First name field.
This is the token selector. Tokens act like handles to the data in the form. Tokens will get filled in later with actual values when the form is submitted.
For the First name field for our new user, we want the First Name token from our Formidable Forms form.
11. Select Formidable – Simple Registration Form that’s highlighted in blue.
12. From the dropdown menu, click on First Name. You’ll see the first name token appear in the text field above.
Follow the same steps for the Last name and Email fields except you’ll want to select the corresponding token for each. For example, choose the Last Name token for the Last name field and the Email Address token for the Email field.
We want our usernames to be the same as the email.
13. For the Username field, select the Email Address token.
14. Leave the Display name blank.
For the password, we want the user to reset it before logging in for the first time. We’ll get to that in a bit.
15. Leave the Password field blank too.
16. Keep the default Subscriber selected for the Roles field.
17. Click No for the Log the new user in? field.
18. Click Do nothing for the What to do if the user already exists field.
19. Click Save.
When you’re done, your new user data form should look like this:
OK. We created our form, did our trigger, and we just finished defining our new user fields. Now, on to our last ingredient—the confirmation email.
20. Under the Set user data section, click on Add action next to the lightning bolt icon.
A set of available integrations will be displayed. We’re going to have WordPress handle this.
21. Select WordPress from the set of integrations.
22. In the dropdown, select Send an email.
We’ll get another form to fill out. This time it’s an email template.
23. Keep the Send an email to at the top and the From and To fields set to their default values.
24. Add your Subject.
25. Compose your message.
For the Body, we get a text editor complete with a token selector icon to work with. That means we can pull in data from WordPress and our Formidable Forms form to compose a personalized message. In my example below, I’m grabbing tokens to personalize the first name and the username. Then, I include a reset password link courtesy of WordPress.
26. Click Save.
Our last step is to make our recipe live. We’ll need to click on all three Draft toggles displayed on our recipe page.
27. Click on each toggle to make them live.
The first one is in the trigger block at the top. The second one is for our WordPress email towards the bottom of the Actions block. Finally, the third one is for the entire recipe, and it’s located in the right sidebar under the Recipe details.
Congratulations! You now have a user registration form that will:
- Create a new WordPress account.
- Send a personalized confirmation.
- Provide a password reset link.
Summary
Here are the essential things we covered:
- Creating a simple Formidable Forms form that takes a First Name, Last Name, and Email.
- Creating a recipe for everyone in Uncanny Automator that’s triggered when the Formidable Forms form is submitted.
- Setting up the recipe action to automatically create a new WordPress user.
- Crafting a custom email autoresponder that sends the account details to the new user.
This is just a simple yet powerful demonstration of how Uncanny Automator can supercharge your contact form. Check out our in-depth blog post on creating registration forms with free form plugins to learn more.
Next steps
Once the basic user registration form is in place, you can add additional actions to the recipe and even add extra fields to the form to capture additional details for the user. Using the Set user meta WordPress action, you can add form data directly to the user’s WordPress profile.
