Forms, messages and the sign-in page

Build a form

Elementor Free has no form widget, so Aether brings one: the DigiPacket Form widget, and the same builder inside DigiPacket Contact, which shows your contact details beside it.

Add fields in the widget and drag them into order. Eleven kinds are available: text, e-mail, phone, website, number, date, message, drop-down list, radio buttons, check boxes and a consent box. Each field can be required or not, take a full or a half row, and carry a line of help.

What a form does is read from the saved page, never from the visitor's browser, so nobody can change where it sends.

Where a message goes

Each message is:

1. E-mailed to the address set in the widget — or, if empty, the site's contact e-mail, or else the administrator's. Its Reply-To is the visitor, so you answer with your mail program's Reply.
2. Kept under Aether → Messages, with a count of unread ones beside the menu entry.

Spam

Forms are protected without a puzzle: a hidden field robots fill in, a signed time stamp that rejects forms sent too fast, and a limit of five messages per visitor every ten minutes. They keep working behind a page cache, and without JavaScript.

The sign-in page

To give your customers a sign-in page of your own:

1. Create a page named Sign in, so that its address ends in /sign-in/ (/login/ works too), and publish it.
2. Open it with Elementor and place the DigiPacket Sign in widget on it.

The widget draws the form beside a panel in your brand colour, with your logo above and a link back to the home page; every word is editable. Until such a page exists, the header's button leads to WooCommerce's account page instead.

• The password is checked by WordPress itself, so a security plugin that guards the usual login guards this page too.
• A wrong e-mail and password get one message that does not say which half was wrong. Five misses in fifteen minutes from one address pause the form.
• Signed in, the page offers the customer's account and Sign out.
• The page has no header or footer, and search engines do not index it.

The header's button reads Sign In and leads there, then My account once your customer is signed in. To show your own call to action instead, set it in Aether → Settings → Header → Header bar.

Letting customers create an account

Turn on Allow customers to create an account on the "My account" page in WooCommerce → Settings → Accounts & Privacy. With the sign-in page in place, the account page then shows only the sign-up form, with Already have an account? Sign in under it.