After someone lands on your website and decides they’re at the right place, they’ll want to contact you. Having a contact form is a perfect way to make this connection happen.
It’s hard not to have a contact form with so many form plugins out there. WPForms is a popular solution clocking in at more than 4 million installs and a five-star rating at the time of writing.
WPForms does an excellent job of simplifying the form building process. It also comes in a pro version with more advanced features. But, what if we need a registration form without having to shop around for another forms product or add-on? 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 WPForms.
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 WPForms> Add New.
2. On the Select a Template page, name the form “WPForms – Simple Registration Form”.
3. Select the Simple Contact Form template.
4. In the Fields editor pane, delete the Comment or Message field text area.
5. Change the submit button to “Register”.
Your form builder should look similar to this.
6. Click Save.
Now that you have a form, you can add it to a page using the shortcode. If you’re using Gutenberg, search for the WPForms 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 everyone because we want to create a new WordPress user. Logged-in users cannot create new users.
3. Click Confirm.
Learn more about Everyone recipes.
4. Name your recipe “Simple registration form using WPForms”.
5. Select WPForms for the integration.
Note: We can only have one trigger for an Everyone recipe.
6. For the trigger, select A form is submitted.
7. For the form, choose our WPForms – 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 WPForms form. Let’s do the first name together.
10. Click on the asterisk icon (*) on the right-hand side of the Email 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 Email field for our new user, we want the Email token from our WPForms form.
11. Select WPForms – Simple Registration Form that’s highlighted in blue.
12. From the dropdown menu, click on Email.
We want our usernames to be the same as the email.
13. So, 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 WPForms 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 Everyone 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 WPForms form that takes a First Name, Last Name, and Email.
- Creating an Everyone recipe in Uncanny Automator that’s triggered when the WPForms 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.
