Google reCAPTCHA v3 Settings

HTML Forms Premium includes additional settings for users who have enabled Google reCAPTCHA v3 in the plugin. These settings are available on a per-form basis. They offer you greater control over how reCAPTCHA v3 interacts with your forms without you having to write your own WordPress hooks or filters.

Enable reCAPTCHA

The base plugin includes Google reCAPTCHA v3 on each of your forms as soon as you enter in valid keys. HTML Forms Premium offers a form setting that lets you toggle reCAPTCHA on or off for each specific form as you desire. You can find this toggle on the Settings tab of your form in the Google reCAPTCHA v3 section.

reCAPTCHA Score Threshold

Google reCAPTCHA v3 works by applying a score to each submission. The submission is rejected if the assigned score is above the threshold. The default score threshold is 0.5. HTML Forms Premium allows you to change that score threshold on each of your forms. You can change your form’s score threshold under the Settings tab in the Google reCAPTCHA v3 section.

Google reCAPTCHA v3

HTML Forms offers support for Google reCAPTCHA v3. The process is simple.

Step #1

Generate a Site Key and a Secret Key for your site by registering at https://www.google.com/recaptcha/admin/.

Step #2

With your keys in hand, add them to the Google reCAPTCHA v3 fields in the HTML Forms plugin settings screen:

Step #3

Confirm your keys are working. A simple notification will appear in the WordPress admin once you have entered in your Site Key and Secret Key and they have been verified to work.

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Debugging Issues with Google reCAPTCHA v3

If you do not see this notification, there is a problem with your keys, and you must visit Google’s reCAPTCHA site to learn more.

Form submission problems with working keys can be investigated further by enabling WP_DEBUG on your WordPress site. HTML Forms will write reCAPTCHA-specific errors and messages to your site’s error log when WP_DEBUG is enabled.

Enable Nonce

HTML Forms has an optional Enable Nonce setting to add the WordPress nonce field to each of your forms. The WordPress nonce provides an extra security and anti-spam layer to your forms. The nonce field helps HTML Forms confirm that a form submission is coming from your site. This is a simple way to add extra security to your form without relying on third-party solutions like hCaptcha or Google reCAPTCHA on your site.

To turn the nonce on, go to the HTML Forms settings screen and select the “Yes” option on the Enable Nonce setting. Save your settings, and the nonce field will automatically appear and be checked on all the forms you’ve created with the plugin. Select the “No” option to immediately remove the nonce field and nonce check from your forms.

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Enabling Nonce on Cached Websites

A word of warning: the nonce field might conflict with your site’s caching plugins or third-party implementations. Many caching solutions have a cache lifetime beyond the expiration time of the WordPress nonce. When this happens, form submissions can become inconsistent.

By default, the value of the Enable Nonce setting is “No” to help prevent these issues. If you do not use caching on your site, you can freely enable the nonce. If you do have caching enabled on your website, check with the caching solution’s settings to determine whether the caching will conflict with the nonce and prevent your forms from submitting reliably.

Dashboard Widget

HTML Forms Premium automatically adds an easy to reference widget to the WordPress dashboard. This dashboard widget lists your active forms, shows how many submissions are unread, and the total number of submissions.

The dashboard widget is enabled by default. You, or your other admin users, can hide it manually if they choose by using the built-in Screen Options feature on the WordPress dashboard.

Require Users to Log In

HTML Forms Premium includes a visibility feature that lets you only show a form when a user is logged in to your site. This feature lets you have greater control over who can see, and submit data, to your website.

Enabling the Require Users to Log In Feature

You’ll need to install HTML Forms Premium to begin. With that done, head over to the Settings tab of the form you wish to enable this feature on. Find the Require Users to Log In field and select the “Yes” option.

It’s that simple. Head to the Messages tab if you’d like to define the text that is shown to users who are not logged in. Find the User Log In Required field and put in whatever text you want to display.

Submission Notifications

HTML Forms Premium includes a feature to provide you with form submission notifications inside the WordPress admin. The notifications show you how many unread, or unseen, submissions you have. These notifications appear in the admin’s menu, on the HTML Forms list, and on each form’s Submissions tab.

How Submission Notifications Appear

WordPress Admin Menu

A counter, displaying the number of unread submissions, appears in the WordPress admin menu next to the HTML Forms link.

HTML Forms List

On the main list of forms, inside the HTML Forms plugin, a notification badge with the number of unread submissions appears like so:

Submissions Tab

On each form, the Submissions tab changes to show you which submissions have not been viewed. The background of each submission’s row is highlighted. An optional “Mark as seen” link is provided to quickly change the submission’s status. Finally, you can use the Bulk Actions menu to quickly mark multiple submissions as seen. Clicking on any individual submission, to view its details, will also mark it as seen.

How to Enable Notifications

First, install HTML Forms Premium. Once that’s done, you can turn on submission notifications on a form-by-form basis. Simply go to the Settings tab of your form and find the Enable Notifications field. Select “Yes” to turn on the submission notification features for this particular form.

Webhooks

HTML Forms Premium adds an action to let you connect your form data to an external service using a webhook. This feature helps unlock the base plugin in an incredible number of ways. You can send data from your visitors to third-party applications or your own internal software tools.

How to Create a Webhook Action

First, you’ll have to install HTML Forms Premium. Once that is complete, you’ll find a new button on the Actions tab of your form called Trigger Webhook. Pressing that button will reveal the window to build the webhook connection to your form.

As you can see in the screenshot, there are three fields in the webhook action.

Webhook URL

This is the destination URL that your form data will be sent to.

Content Type

Define what type of content will be sent to the webhook URL. Your choices are JSON or encoded form data.

Additional Headers

If your Webhook URL requires additional headers, like authorization, you can include that information here.

Retry Attempts

Define how many times your webhook will attempt to contact your URL if a failure occurs.

Debug Mode

Setting this value to “Yes” will output debug information to your server’s error log whenever a webhook attempt fails.

Sending Data to the Webhook

All data included in the form is sent to the webhook whenever there is a successful submission. It is sent in the format you chose in the Content Type field to the address in your Webhook URL field, with any headers you included in Additional Headers. It is the responsibility of the service running at the Webhook URL to handle things from there.

Submission Limit

HTML Forms Premium includes a setting, for each form, that lets you define a Submission Limit. This can be found in the Settings tab of your form. By placing a value in the field, you can define how many submissions your form is allowed to accept.

Your form will no longer load when the number of submissions meets the Submission Limit. The message that displays when this situation occurs can be set in the Messages tab. Find the field called Submission Limit Reached and enter in the text you want to show users who visit a form that has met its limit.

Export Submissions

HTML Forms Premium adds the ability to export your form submissions to a spreadsheet file on your computer. This is an excellent way to pull data from your site for backup or to send to others. This feature includes a simple feature to offer additional control over the export file format.

How to Export Submissions for a Form

Once you have installed HTML Forms Premium, the Submissions tab on your forms will automatically include a button labeled Export Submissions. Pushing this button will trigger a download of a spreadsheet file containing every submission for that form.

Settings for Export Submissions

Unfortunately, not all spreadsheet programs are created equally. Certain programs open up files expecting different delimiters between data. A delimiter helps determine how data is organized into columns. The HTML Forms Settings screen, with Premium installed, will allow you to set the Export Delimiter of the file with one of four choices: a comma, a semicolon, a tab, or a vertical bar.

File Uploads

HTML Forms Premium adds a File Upload field to the base plugin. You can use this field to let users include files with their form submissions. You won’t have to write any of your own file uploading or processing code. HTML Forms Premium will handle all of that for you.

File Upload Field

Once you have installed HTML Forms Premium, the File Upload field will be included in the Fields tab of your forms. This new field asks you to provide a Field Label, a list of Associated File Types, and whether the field is required to submit the form.

Pressing the Add Field to Form button will automatically insert the necessary HTML into your form. The actual processing of the file, as mentioned above, will happen automatically. Of course, you can modify some of that processing. Let’s discuss that next.

Settings for File Uploads

On the main Settings screen, for HTML Forms, will be an additional area for File Uploads when HTML Forms Premium is active. There are three different settings you can adjust to modify how file uploads are processed and presented.

Direct Links

You can control how file uploads are linked in your Submissions tab and e-mail notifications. Select Yes to turn on direct links to actual files. Select No to have your file uploads link to the WordPress Media Library.

Media Library Uploads

HTML Forms Premium will let you decide if file uploads are included in the WordPress Media Library. Select Yes to always include uploaded files in the Media Library. Select No to disable this feature. The No option will make all links direct, regardless of your Direct Links setting.

Maximum File Size

The third setting for File Uploads lets you control the maximum file size of any upload. Leave the setting empty, or place a 0, to let files of any size be uploaded. Set a value, measured in bytes, to set a specific maximum file size to apply to all of your File Upload fields on all forms.