Custom forms emailing a PDF

  • Hi

    We have an urgent requirement to satisfy the following requirements due to us moving an old site with out of date PHP code to a new host (PHP 5.5 to 8). Can anyone suggest a plugin or plugins that might let us accomplish this in the most secure manner possible.

    – Setup an online form to gather client data both personal and health data
    – Form should ideally allow logic – ie if answering one thing it leads to a different set of following questions
    – The form needs to take the data on submission and create a PDF copy of the form and email it to the user submitting it (email would be a field in the form) and to a set email to us. Ideally this would be in a PDF rather than in the email itself
    – The data should only transfer by email using SMTP set up for the wordpress site and should not be stored in any database in wordpress
    – Email should be absolutely as secure as possible
    – WordPress 5 9 3 installed on php 8
    – Should be as simple as possible but allowing for the above functionality

    Any help suggesting plugins that could achieve this would be much appreciated. I presume the core build cannot! The tricky part is the converting to PDF and emailing. Open to other similar suggestions too if anyone has any. Thanks again.

    • This topic was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Developing with WordPress topic
Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Take a look at WPForms: https://wpforms.com
    There is a plugin for WPForms which allows the PDF-Generation for E-Mails: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/pdf-builder-for-wpforms/
    Also take a look here: https://wpforms.com/how-to-print-your-wordpress-form-submissions-to-pdf/

    Hint: WordPress 5.9.3 is not fully compatible with PHP 8.0. Also much plugins do not support it. If you don’t find any errors in your project – good. If you do encounter problems, PHP 7.4 would be the better alternative at this time.

    Thread Starter 1983dons

    (@1983dons)

    Hi thanks. I am not sure that satisfies all our requirements (auto creates PDF and attaches it to an email and sends and does not record into a database).

    Can you tell me in what ways WordPress 5.9.3 is not compatible with PHP 8 is there moves to develop it so that it is? We were told to use the most recent version of wordpress and our host is using PHP 8 now. With what version of PHP is recommended as max for wordpress 5 9 3?

    Thread Starter 1983dons

    (@1983dons)

    Does wpforms allow the user to complete a form and the results to be emailed to someone directly without any of the detail being saved into the database? Our IG team perceive this saving into a table as an extra data risk.

    With WPForms you can define per form what should happen. Sending emails both to the person filling out the form and to a recipient at the website operator can be configured without any problems.

    I am a bit surprised about the statement that saving in the database would be more risky than an email. The e-mail can be intercepted/read by anyone on the Internet, whereas a local database is not. In the EU, the storage in the database would be preferable because such form data always contain personal data. Really strange that I see the statement the other way around.

    Saving the entries in the database can certainly be prevented (the free Lite version of WPForms, for example, generally does not do this), I just do not know the way to do this in the paid versions. If you have further questions about WPForms, please contact their support: https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/wpforms-lite/ or if you have further questions about PDF generation, please contact the developer of the plugin mentioned above.

    For WordPress compatibility with PHP you can find a matrix here: https://make.www.ads-software.com/core/handbook/references/php-compatibility-and-wordpress-versions/ – the support for PHP 8 and newer is considered as beta because there can be notices or warnings in different places. In the WordPress-Trac of the core-developers you can look at which places are already being worked on: https://core.trac.www.ads-software.com – if you find a place that has not yet been identified, you are welcome to open a ticket and point it out to the core-team.
    My recommendation would be to use PHP 7.4 as most of the current plugins are compatible with it. Of course it is up to you to use PHP 8, but you should be aware that in case of errors with this PHP version there may be no other remedy than to use PHP 7.4 until updates of the affected plugins or WordPress are available.

    Thread Starter 1983dons

    (@1983dons)

    Ok thanks. WPforms Lite seems like it might suffice although the hcaptcha is failing for some reason just now.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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