Welcome to another edition of WordPress Wednesday at Website Magazine.

Each week our editors profile a WordPress plugin they believe provides unparalelled value to WordPress blog operators and administrators. This week, let's take a look at the Formstack WordPress plugin.

One of the benefits of having a website or weblog for a company is that it carries with it the ability to increase interaction and engagement with your audience. As greater demands are placed on Internet marketers (and weblog administrators) to show return on their promotional efforts (like the development of content), collecting information from site visitors is fast becoming a crucial. To do that you will need to have a data collection strategy and the form you use to collect information will be taking center stage. Fortunately for WordPress bloggers, several form plugins exist to make the process about as simple as it can get. case in point - Formstack.

Formstack's Web Form plugin (which is free - non-commercial) enables you to embed a Formstack form into your sidebar, posts, or pages. Users can create far more than just standard contact forms. Thanks to a bevy of third-party integrations, contact forms can connect with payment services like PayPal, email services like MailChimp, or CRM services like Salesforce.

The Formstack plugin adds a button to the TinyMCE editor that allows you to select the Formstack web form you wish to embed. Once the form of your choice is selected, a shortcode will be inserted into the editor, which will be converted to the selected form once your page or post is rendered. This plugin supports the following shortcodes [Formstack], [formstack], and [fs]. 

The plugin has only been downloaded a handful of times (just over 150 times) at WordPress but it was only released September 13th, 2010. You'll need a Formstack account to use the plugin but if you are only interested in testing out the plugin there is a free option available which provides up to three forms with 10 fields per form and fifty saved entries. If you're looking into new ways to acquire information from users and run a WordPress blog, Formstack is one of the premier to collect and manage data.