Beyond Basic Forms - Advanced WS Form Techniques for Your LMS with Mark Westguard

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In the latest LMSCast episode, Chris Badgett reintroduces Mark Westguard, the creator of WS Form a robust and adaptable form-building WordPress plugin.

Mark Westguard, the creator and principal developer of WS Form, a robust and developer-friendly form-building plugin for WordPress, founded it. Mark and Chris explore advanced applications of forms beyond the typical contact form, emphasizing their potential to improve learning websites and streamline intricate workflows. With over 150 customizable templates and more than 90 integrations, WS Form allows users to connect with platforms such as Mailchimp, CRMs, Make, Zapier, and others.

No matter if you’re gathering leads, organizing quizzes, carrying out surveys, developing calculators, or generating WordPress posts from form entries, WS Form offers dynamic features that streamline configuration and enhance flexibility. No matter if you’re gathering leads, organizing quizzes, carrying out surveys, developing calculators, or generating WordPress posts from form entries, WS Form offers dynamic features that streamline configuration and enhance flexibility.

Additionally, Mark describes how WS Form can create forms dynamically depending on third-party connections, such as importing Mailchimp lists and automatically creating mapped fields, making the process very user-friendly. This episode is jam-packed with tips for WordPress experts, site builders, and course developers who want to improve the way they utilize forms to engage people and optimize workflows.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a return guest. His name is Mark West Guard. He’s from WS Form. You can find that@wsform.com. It’s an incredible form building system for WordPress. It has a free version, which is awesome, and we’re gonna dive deep into forms and blow your mind about all the things you can do.

But first, welcome to the show, mark. Hey Chris. 

Mark Westguard: Thank you for having me again. Good to be back. It’s been a while. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it has been a while. I see. I saw you in person recently, but it’s been a while since you’ve been on the show. That’s 

Mark Westguard: right. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Mark Westguard: We usually 

Chris Badgett: see each other at a work camp. Yeah. Seems like a once a year or twice a year.

That’s right. Let’s expand the minds of what’s possible with forms. People know there’s contact forms, there’s a email newsletter or lead magnet sign up form, but what are some other, just at a high level, like what, just rattle off some other ways people can use forms on their website, particularly for.

Learning sites, but really any site. 

Mark Westguard: Yeah. You’ve got your user contact us form, like we just discussed, which is super easy to set up. We’ve got templates for that. But other things like newsletter sign up and what’s quite important is obviously getting that data stored somewhere so you can use it.

So if you’ve got an email marketing platform that you’re using or a CRM platform. That’s certainly something that we can cater to. We have 90 plus integrations now. And a few of those integrations are things like Make or Zapier where you can actually connect to hundreds of other different platforms.

So we’re integrated in with those as well. And then you’ve got things like. Creating custom posts in WordPress is possible. Calculators, quizzes, all kinds of stuff. So the list is pretty much endless. I think we now, we’ve got a hundred, 150 plus templates. Some of those are static, so those would be like, it’ll just create like a qui, a quiz for you or a survey.

But some of them are dynamic. So some of our templates are dynamic and such that you would, to give you an example, like if you were connected to MailChimp, for example it’ll show you your MailChimp lists in the templates. And then you can choose one of those lists. Click on one of those and it’ll actually build the form for you.

So you’d. Really don’t have to do a huge amount of work. It’ll just put all the fields in, map those to MailChimp, and then you just have to add that to a page on your on  your site. So yeah lots of different use cases. 

Chris Badgett: I think one of the biggest questions that we try to answer on this podcast for course graders and also the web professionals that build sites for the e-learning industry 

Is how do I get clients. One of the ways you get clients is by having lead magnets. So something that somebody opts into. Yep. But there’s, you can get creative with it. Like in the early days it was, it’s like an ebook or sign up for a newsletter.

Some digital thing. But I think the calculators are really interesting. I’ve seen people do things, particularly if they’re teaching business 

Where they have some kind of business niche and they have people like type in some variables. Hey, if you go through my program.

And how much do you think your thing would sell for? And yeah. How many people on your email list right now and I’m like a business coach. 

Mark Westguard: It 

Chris Badgett: can calculate like your potential ROI from joining the program or something like that. Tell us a little, and you have AI to help non-professional form builders like. Get a start on building the form. So tell us more about calculators. 

Mark Westguard: Yeah. We have what are called calculated fields. So you can basically add any number of inputs to the form. So this could be number inputs, they could be maybe a range slider. If you wanna make it like a nice user interface for it you can put prices in there and then use the calculated fields to combine those different values and come out with an output.

And that output could be. As simple as a number form, or it could be even just some nice HTML. So if you want to use your skills and design skills to make something look really pretty, we can actually inject the output into HTML. And then you can make it a really nice looking calculator. Like you said, you could have a, maybe someone that’s got a course that will save somebody, X amount of dollars per unit you could be able to calculate it around that.

And then just on the point on the ai. We have AI built into WS form where you can actually type the type of form that you want, so you can literally talk to it as a human. Almost a five-year-old child tends to work better. But just type in what you want, so you type in the type of calculator that you want, and it will then build that form for you with the calculations ready, and then you can use that as a basis for your form and edit it and make it responsive and make it look any way that you want.

So yeah the calculator thing can be a really good way to entice people into purchasing your product. ’cause they can see instantly the kind of savings or how much money they’re gonna make as a result of using that course. We have a lot of people doing that actually. 

Chris Badgett: Can you do it in a way where they have to submit their email address before the calculation reveals?

Mark Westguard: Yeah, you can do that. So we have. A thing called email validation in WS f