Forms overview

Forms connects your WordPress website to AspirePro. The forms you already run — a "Contact us" form, a "Request a proposal" form, a newsletter sign-up — keep working exactly as they do today. For the forms you choose, each new entry is sent to AspirePro, which finds or creates the contact and their company, keeps the entry as a submission, and adds it to the person's timeline.

How it works#

1. Connect your site. Install the AspirePro plugin in WordPress and approve the connection in AspirePro. See Connect a WordPress site.
2. The plugin lists your forms. It finds every form built with Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7 or WPForms, with the pages each one appears on, and they show up under Forms → Forms.
3. You choose what to capture. Nothing is sent until you switch Capture on for a form. Then you tell AspirePro where each field goes — email, name, phone, company — and how it may update a contact who is already here. See Choose forms and map fields.
4. Entries arrive as submissions. Someone fills in the form; within moments the entry appears under Forms → Submissions. AspirePro checks it for spam, matches it to a contact by email (or phone), creates the contact and links a company when needed, and records every change it made. See Submissions.
5. It shows up on the record. The contact and company each get a Forms tab listing their entries, and the timeline gets one entry per submission. See Forms on contacts and companies.

Capture is opt-in, form by form. A form you haven't switched on sends nothing, and fields you mark Don't send — along with password and payment fields, always — never leave your website.

Submissions are never lost in transit. The plugin queues each entry on your site and retries until AspirePro accepts it, and the form itself never waits on AspirePro.

Where things live#

Forms is its own item in the main menu, with two pages under it:

• Submissions — every entry from the forms you capture, what it did, and anything that needs a decision.
• Forms — every form found on your connected sites, grouped by site, each with its Capture switch. Open a form to map its fields and set how it handles contacts, companies and notifications.

The Websites button on the Forms page opens Forms settings, which has two tabs:

• Websites — your connected WordPress sites and their health. See Connect a WordPress site.
• Defaults — the organization-wide settings every form starts from. See Forms settings below.

With Forms turned on and permission to connect websites, System → Integrations also shows a WordPress card that opens the Websites tab.

Who can do what#

Forms has five permissions, set per role under System → Roles (see Roles & permissions):

• Access Forms — see submissions, the Forms list, the Websites tab, and the Forms tab on contacts and companies. Everything is read-only with this alone.
• Manage forms — switch capture on and off, map fields, change a form's contact, company and notification settings, and act on submissions: process again, choose or move the contact, mark as spam or not spam.
• Connect websites — connect a site, edit it, pause it, rotate its key and disconnect it.
• Delete submissions — permanently delete submissions.
• Forms settings — change the organization defaults on the Defaults tab.

With the standard roles, administrators have all five; managers have everything except deleting submissions; users and viewers have Access Forms.

Forms settings#

The Defaults tab of Forms settings needs the Forms settings permission. A form's own settings can override the update rules; everything else applies to every form.

• Update rules for existing contacts — the rule each kind of field follows when the contact is already here. Standard uses the built-in rule shown in brackets. A form can override any of them on its Mapping tab. See Update rules.
• Spam — the score at which an entry is held as spam (5 unless you change it), and lists of blocked emails, domains and IP addresses. See Spam.
• What the plugin collects:
• Campaign and page details — the page, referrer and UTM campaign that brought the visitor, remembered with a first-party cookie on your site. On unless you turn it off.
• Visitor IP address — helps the spam check. On unless you turn it off; switch it off if your privacy policy doesn't cover it.
• Capture new forms automatically — off unless you turn it on. When off, a form added to a site later waits until someone switches it on.

Your connected sites pick up a change to the first two within a few minutes. - Retention — clear the answers of submissions older than a number of months. The submission's date, form, contact and outcome stay, so timelines and counts still add up; the answers, source details and IP address are removed. Contacts are not affected. Leave it empty to keep answers forever.

Switching Forms off#

Forms is a module an administrator can turn off under System → Features (see Features). It is on for every organization unless someone turns it off. While it is off:

• The Forms menu item, its pages, the Forms tab and the Website forms card on contacts and companies disappear.
• Connected sites keep their entries instead of sending them. The plugin shows that Forms is switched off in AspirePro and tries again every hour; entries wait on the site for up to 30 days.
• Nothing already in AspirePro is deleted. Timeline entries from forms stay on contacts and companies, without their link to the submission.
• Forms notifications stop.

When you turn Forms back on, the waiting entries arrive and are processed as usual.

Working through Prox#

Prox can read and act on Forms for anyone whose role allows it:

• list_records / get_record with type form_submission, form or website — find submissions (by status, outcome, form, site, contact or company), forms and connected sites
• manage_form_submission — process a submission again, mark it as spam or not spam, or link it to a contact (or a new one)
• set_form_capture — switch capture on or off for a form
• delete_form_submission — permanently delete a submission