More Form Handler
When you implement a form on a website possibly the most difficult aspect to get correct is the form handler. In many cases this is not evident as most implentations the processing is carried out in the background.
In the case of a Wordpress form there are limited options for the webmaster to configure as such it probably means that a 3rd party solution (via a plug-in) is the best bet. Even then you are then pretty much tied into the options of that solution.
I did get a working example that echoes input back to the screen after validation. php_validation.php
Village Hall
2025 - when asked could I get the forms on the VH website to work so that the process was somewhat "automated" my short answer is Yes but the long answer is that it would require a lot of effort and would be close to "teaching a pig to sing!"
The forms developed by the first webmaster of the Village Hall Website would be sufficient enough but they would need serious testing and debugging. This is a resource that the VHC do not have.
The Wordpress Contact Form in its most basic form is currently on the VH website. I have a page describing that. At first I thought that the booking forms would follow as they do (or did) exist on the Wordpress IDE but not published. Apparently this was a step too far
Looking back at the work that I had done for the Village Hall Website I realise that I had done so much. The decision in 2020 that I was going to abandon my development of my own forms and handlers was jusitified because to this day no interest in pursuing on-line booking seems to exist.
Echoing back to the screen
This is the easy bit! In most cases far more back-end processing needs to happen such as the generation of response emails, the buidling of lists etc.
The basic Contact form is a good example as the response to the form being completed is an email to the person sending the message. Well, that is my interpretation I think Wordpress just creates an email to the administator by default. The contents of the message field and who sent the message is contained in this email. The data is also stored in the system logs.