How to Build Custom Comment Forms for WordPress with Advanced Custom Fields?
Using Advanced Custom Fields plugin, you can modify forms, including WordPress comment forms to have advanced functionality. This software is currently used by over 1 million active users.
Advanced comments are one way of learning more about your users, their preferences, marketing effectiveness, or whatever additional information you decide to glean, using these additional fields. With more than 30 different field types, you can be sure that there’s one built to suit your particular needs.
With anything this amazingly powerful, you know there has to be a catch right? Some super- cool features will require purchasing the PRO version, available from $49/year. The free version isn’t strictly a demo – in fact it’s very powerful. Although there are premium features available, we are not compensated in any way for recommending this solution. It’s just powerful software that can do comment form customization and a whole lot more.
In addition to a database of answers, a community forum and support ticket channels, help can also be via their Hire an Expert feature, which lets you tap into help on bigger or more complex projects.
Note: This is fairly complex software and has been noted by new users to be a bit of a challenge. To get a better idea of the scope of this undertaking, have a look at the resource documentation available on the plugin author site: advancedcustomfields.com/resources/
Before installing, activating and using this plugin on your site, please review the Getting Started Questions (and answers). There’s sound advice here not to be overlooked, including things like backups, child themes, custom fields and field groups. It’s better to learn before a crash and burn, than after!
nstall the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin using our How to Install Plugins procedure: Advanced Custom Fields
Once the plugin is installed and activated, customize via new menu item: Custom Fields
The number of potential uses is virtually limitless and all depends on your objectives for commenting.
The marketing department might appreciate each post to include a different field on each one, so that you learn a tiny bit about each commenter, without seeming intrusive or a burden. After a while, you’ll be able to build incredibly detailed profiles about your user base.
The operations and support teams might like to ask a quick multi-option or true-false survey question with each post, so that they get feedback about service delivery, product quality, or simply to raise awareness about features/benefits likely to resonate and help lead someone to a purchase decision.
There’s some great information in the Resources, Code Examples section of the plugin author website. A lot of this revolves around not just collecting commenter information, but how to get information out of your WordPress database so that you can personalize the user experience. Relevance and engagement are two huge keys to building satisfied customers.
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