Description

OW Forms is a modern WordPress form builder for sites that prioritize performance, accessibility, and GDPR compliance. Built by OptionWeb for production use on client sites, it ships with a JSON-driven schema engine, a REST-based submission pipeline, and a curated set of 16 field types — text, email, tel, URL, number, textarea, select, radio, checkbox, checkbox-group, date, time, datetime, file upload, hidden, and rating — plus auto-injected GDPR consent and anti-spam fields.

The anti-spam stack runs four layers in parallel: a visually-hidden honeypot input that bots fill but humans never see, a time-trap that rejects submissions completed faster than a configurable threshold, a multi-provider CAPTCHA layer (Cloudflare Turnstile, Google reCAPTCHA v3, hCaptcha, or Friendly Captcha), and optional OW Shield IP reputation scoring with a disposable-email blocklist. Every signal is logged so you can tune thresholds without flying blind. Submissions that score above 80 are silently rejected — no error message, no honeypot leak.

GDPR compliance is native, not bolted on. Every form gets a consent checkbox linked to your privacy policy, IP addresses can be stored pseudonymized or not at all, user agents are SHA-256 hashed by default, and a daily cron purges submissions older than your retention window (CNIL default: 1095 days). When OW Consent is active, OW Forms wires into its DSAR endpoint — erasure requests automatically delete matching submissions by email hash, with full audit trail. Submission emails are SHA-256 hashed with a plugin-owned salt (option owfo_dsar_salt, generated once at activation) so the database never holds plaintext PII linkable across systems, and DSAR erasure keeps working even after wp config shuffle-salts.

The one-click Contact Form 7 importer parses every CF7 form in your database, builds the equivalent OW Forms schema (preserving recipient, subject, and field types), and rewrites every [contact-form-7 id="..."] shortcode in your posts to [owfo_form id="..."]. Email notifications support HTML or plain text with {{token}} interpolation, optional auto-reply, signed outbound webhooks (HMAC-SHA256), and a Gutenberg block in addition to the shortcode and REST API.

External services

OW Forms relies on optional third-party CAPTCHA services to protect form submissions
from spam. None of these services are contacted unless you explicitly enable a
CAPTCHA provider in OW Forms Settings Anti-spam.

The OW Shield integration is fully local — when the OW Shield plugin is installed
and active on the same site, OW Forms reads its IP reputation score from the local
database/cache. No request leaves your server for this lookup; OW Shield itself
may contact its own reputation service, which is disclosed in the OW Shield readme.

The Friendly Captcha widget JavaScript is bundled with OW Forms under
assets/js/vendor/ (no external CDN is hit at page render). Source: the upstream
MIT-licensed package at https://github.com/FriendlyCaptcha/friendly-challenge —
the files shipped here are the official npm friendly-challenge@0.9.18 build
outputs (widget.module.js and widget.module.min.js, unmodified, renamed to
friendly-challenge-0.9.18.module.js / friendly-challenge-0.9.18.module.min.js
to make the version explicit in the filename). Both the minified and the
human-readable non-minified source are shipped per WordPress.org Plugin Check
requirements.

When a CAPTCHA provider is enabled, OW Forms loads the vendor’s JavaScript widget
on pages that render a form, and posts the challenge solution back to the vendor’s
verification API when a visitor submits the form. The data sent to the vendor is
limited to: (a) the challenge token generated client-side by the vendor’s widget,
(b) the visitor’s IP address (passed through to the vendor for fraud scoring), and
(c) the site’s API secret key configured in the settings.

Cloudflare Turnstile

What it is: a CAPTCHA / bot-mitigation service by Cloudflare, Inc.
When data is sent: only when spam_captcha_provider is set to turnstile, and
only on form submission. The widget JS is also loaded on every page that renders
a form.
Data sent: Turnstile challenge token, visitor IP, your Turnstile secret key.
Terms of service: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-terms/
Privacy policy: https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/

Google reCAPTCHA v3

What it is: an invisible CAPTCHA / risk-scoring service by Google LLC.
When data is sent: only when spam_captcha_provider is set to recaptcha_v3, and
only on form submission. The widget JS is also loaded on every page that renders
a form (this is how reCAPTCHA v3 builds its risk score).
Data sent: reCAPTCHA token, visitor IP, your reCAPTCHA secret key. Google may
also collect additional telemetry as described in their privacy policy.
Terms of service: https://policies.google.com/terms
Privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy

hCaptcha

What it is: a privacy-focused CAPTCHA service by Intuition Machines, Inc.
When data is sent: only when spam_captcha_provider is set to hcaptcha, and
only on form submission. The widget JS is also loaded on every page that renders
a form.
Data sent: hCaptcha token, visitor IP, your hCaptcha secret key.
Terms of service: https://www.hcaptcha.com/terms
Privacy policy: https://www.hcaptcha.com/privacy

Friendly Captcha

What it is: a privacy-first, proof-of-work CAPTCHA service by Friendly Captcha GmbH
(Germany). No user puzzle, no tracking cookies.
When data is sent: only when spam_captcha_provider is set to friendly_captcha,
and only on form submission. The widget JS itself is bundled with OW Forms (not
loaded from an external CDN); only the verification request reaches the vendor.
Data sent: Friendly Captcha challenge token, visitor IP, your Friendly Captcha
secret key.
Terms of service: https://friendlycaptcha.com/legal/terms/
Privacy policy: https://friendlycaptcha.com/legal/privacy-end-users/

Outgoing webhook (admin-configured)

What it is: a URL of your choosing that OW Forms POSTs to after each submission.
No data leaves your site until you fill the webhook_url setting in OW Forms
Settings Notifications.
When data is sent: on every form submission, immediately after the admin
notification email is dispatched. Non-blocking — your visitor’s submission
response is not delayed by the webhook endpoint’s latency.
Data sent: form id, submission id, sanitized field payload (the same data
stored in your wp_owfo_submissions table), site URL, ISO 8601 timestamp.
If a webhook secret is configured, an X-OWFO-Signature HMAC-SHA256 header
is added so the receiver can verify the payload origin.
Vendor: whoever owns the URL you configured. OW Forms has no built-in vendor
for this — it is your responsibility to ensure the receiving endpoint complies
with applicable privacy regulations for your submissions.

Installation

Upload ow-forms to /wp-content/plugins/.
Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu.
Navigate to OW Forms > Forms to create your first form.

FAQ

Can I migrate from Contact Form 7?: Yes — OW Forms ships with a one-click Contact Form 7 importer that converts every CF7 form to an OW Forms schema and rewrites all [contact-form-7] shortcodes in your post content.
Does it integrate with OW Consent?: Yes — form submissions automatically link to OW Consent records when the plugin is active, and DSAR erasure requests automatically delete matching submissions by email hash.
Which CAPTCHA providers are supported?: Cloudflare Turnstile, Google reCAPTCHA v3, hCaptcha, and Friendly Captcha. Provider and site/secret keys are configured globally in the Anti-spam settings.
Where are uploaded files stored?: In wp-content/uploads/owf-uploads/YYYY/MM/, protected by a deny-all .htaccess. Files are MIME-validated against a configurable extension allowlist and hash-checked (SHA-256) on storage.
Is there a REST API?: Yes — under the owfo/v1 namespace. Public submission endpoint is nonce-protected; admin endpoints require manage_options capability.
What happens if I run `wp config shuffle-salts`?: Nothing breaks. OW Forms hashes submission emails with a dedicated plugin-owned salt stored in the owfo_dsar_salt option (generated once at activation, never regenerated). It does NOT depend on wp_salt() / the AUTH_KEY constants, so DSAR erasure requests continue to match historical submissions after shuffle-salts. If you want to force-rotate the OW Forms salt (which would invalidate every existing email hash and break future DSAR matching), delete the owfo_dsar_salt option manually via WP-CLI — the next submission will bootstrap a fresh one.

Reviews

There are no reviews for this plugin.

Contributors & Developers

“OW Forms” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

OptionWeb

Translate “OW Forms” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

1.1.0

Compatibility: declared Tested up to: 7.0 (the current WordPress release). 1.0.9 shipped with 6.8, which Plugin Check flagged as outdated (6.8 < 7.0).
Readme: shortened the 1.0.9 upgrade notice to stay under the 300-character Plugin Check limit. No behavioural code changes since 1.0.9.

1.0.9

GDPR (critical): decoupled email_hash() from wp_salt(). The previous implementation used wp_salt() as the hashing factor, so any admin running wp config shuffle-salts (a routine WordPress security hygiene step) would have silently invalidated every email hash already stored in wp_owfo_submissions — every subsequent DSAR erasure request would then have failed to match the historical rows, leaving PII the visitor explicitly asked to delete sitting in the database with no error trail. The plugin now uses a dedicated, plugin-owned salt persisted in the owfo_dsar_salt option (generated once at activation, never regenerated, autoload OFF). Existing installs receive the salt on first call via lazy bootstrap, but no existing hash needs to be re-computed — only newly-written submissions use the new salt, and DSAR matching keeps working on rows written under either salt provided neither is rotated. Recommended for ALL sites.
Fixed: Tested up to corrected to 6.8 (was incorrectly set to 7.0, a WordPress version that does not exist yet — would have been flagged by Plugin Check as an invalid version reference).
Fixed: admin settings save now routes from_email and default_recipient_email through sanitize_email() instead of the generic sanitize_text_field(), catching malformed inputs at save time instead of silently storing strings that wp_mail() would later reject.
Fixed: route_handle_submission REST endpoint now returns a 404 when called against a submission id that does not exist, instead of silently returning {ok: true} after a no-op wpdb->update.
Fixed: anti-spam link-density scan now also detects bare www.example.com URLs (no protocol prefix), which spambots commonly use to slip past the previous https?:// regex.
Compliance: shipped the non-minified friendly-challenge-0.9.18.module.js next to the existing .min.js, per WP.org Plugin Check requirements (vendored minified JS must ship with the human-readable source alongside).
Compliance: added .distignore at the plugin root so the WP.org SVN-deploy pipeline excludes dev-only files (node_modules, tests, build configs) from the published ZIP.
Compliance: created the empty languages/ directory at the plugin root so the make pot build step has a known output location and translators can drop their .po files in a predictable place.

1.0.8

Compliance: bumped Tested up to from 6.9 to 7.0 to satisfy the Plugin Check outdated_tested_upto_header rule (the header must point to the current WordPress release for the plugin to surface in directory searches). [Note: 7.0 is not a valid WordPress version — corrected to 6.8 in 1.0.9.]

1.0.7

Fixed (regression): the legacy [owf_form] shortcode rewrite in post content now actually runs on sites that transited through 1.0.5. The 1.0.6 release introduced the SQL REPLACE but gated it behind the existing owfo_migrated_owf_prefix flag — which any 1.0.5 install already had set to '1', so the rewrite was skipped on the largest existing fleet. The step is now gated by its own independent flag owfo_migrated_shortcode_content so it runs exactly once per install regardless of the version transit path.
Fixed: the shortcode-content REPLACE now excludes post_type IN ('revision', 'auto-draft') and post_status IN ('inherit', 'auto-draft'). Rewriting historical revisions would have silently re-authored users’ version history.
Fixed: hCaptcha invisible-flow second-submit deadlock. The callback registered on hcaptcha.render() only captures the FIRST submit’s resolve — every subsequent submit hung forever (button locked, spinner stuck). The render callback now dispatches through holder._owfoHcaptchaResolve, which is updated on every submit before execute() is called.
Bumped Requires at least from 6.0 to 6.3 to match the apiVersion: 3 declared in blocks/form/block.json (block.json apiVersion 3 was introduced in WP 6.3).

1.0.6

Fixed (intent, but see 1.0.7 for the actually-working version): wired the in-place migration of legacy [owf_form id="..."] shortcodes in post content. The migration was correctly added to migrate_from_owf_prefix() but shared the owfo_migrated_owf_prefix idempotency flag with the four pre-existing migration steps, which meant sites that had already run 1.0.5 skipped the new step entirely. Fix landed in 1.0.7.
Compliance: renamed the four captcha script handles from owf-captcha-* (3-char prefix) to owfo-captcha-* (4-char prefix). Aligns with the WordPress.org plugin guideline that the prefix rule covers script/style handles, not only PHP identifiers.
Compliance: the Gutenberg block now ships a real block.json manifest under blocks/form/ (api-version 3) so Plugin Check stops emitting block_no_block_json and the block is discoverable by the editor inserter metadata API.
Fixed (partial — see 1.0.7 for the hCaptcha second-submit fix): front-end captcha token retrieval now actually supports hCaptcha (invisible flow with render + execute) and Friendly Captcha (proof-of-work widget with doneCallback polling). Previous versions silently shipped empty tokens for both providers, which the server rejected with score +100 — all hCaptcha / Friendly Captcha submissions were therefore dropped client-side without any error message.
Removed: signature is no longer listed as a supported field type. It was advertised in 1.0.x but render_field() and sanitize_value() only ever fell back to <input type="text">. The field count in the description is now 16 (was 17). A real canvas-based signature widget will land in a future release.

1.0.5

Addressed the second-round feedback from the WordPress.org plugin review team.
Removed the legacy [owf_form] back-compat shortcode — the < 4-character prefix didn’t meet the WordPress.org plugin guidelines. Existing posts had already been migrated in place to [owfo_form] by the 1.0.3 upgrade routine, so the removal only affects content that was never opened for editing after that upgrade.
Fixed a broken Terms of Use URL pointing to Friendly Captcha in the External Services section (/legal/terms-of-service/ /legal/terms/).

1.0.4

Added an uninstall.php handler so all plugin data (custom tables, options, form posts) is cleaned up on plugin deletion.
Added a LICENSE.txt file at the plugin root pointing to the GNU GPL v2 text.
Hardened the anti-spam time-trap with a server-anchored HMAC. The previous design’s client-set timestamp was trivially forgeable; the new check binds the gate to a signed render timestamp.
Captcha vendor scripts (Turnstile / reCAPTCHA / hCaptcha / Friendly Captcha) now load only on pages that actually render a form, instead of every page of the site once a provider is configured.
Added a composite index (form_id, status, id) on the submissions table — eliminates filesort on the admin list filter under high row counts. Existing installs pick the index up automatically on upgrade.
Settings option is now autoloaded, replacing the per-request SELECT it triggered on cache-cold pages.
Shared budget between the retention purge and the orphan-files sweep so a single cron tick never exceeds a known total of disk + DB ops. Filterable via owfo_purge_budget_per_tick.
Internal: spam reject threshold is now a named constant (OWFO_Spam::REJECT_THRESHOLD) filterable via owfo_spam_reject_threshold; routing parameters are stripped from the REST submit payload before validation; baseline check on the uploads directory is memoised per request; OW Shield IP-reputation integration explicitly documented in the external-services section.

1.0.3

Addressed feedback from the WordPress.org plugin review team.
Renamed internal prefix from owf_ to owfo_ to satisfy the 4+ character minimum required by WordPress.org. Existing installations migrate automatically on activation; the legacy [owf_form] shortcode continues to work for backward compatibility.
CSS and JavaScript are now loaded via wp_enqueue_style() / wp_enqueue_script() instead of inline <style> / <script> blocks. Assets only load on pages that actually render a form.
File uploads now use the WordPress core wp_handle_upload() API instead of move_uploaded_file().
Form schemas saved through the admin UI are recursively sanitized (every string leaf passes through sanitize_text_field()).
Documented every third-party CAPTCHA provider (Turnstile, reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, Friendly Captcha) in the new == External services == section with what data is sent, when, and links to each vendor’s terms and privacy policy.

1.0.2

WordPress.org Plugin Directory compliance pass (18/18 rules).
i18n source language switched to English; French shipped as a translation file under languages/ow-forms-fr_FR.po. languages/ow-forms.pot template included for community translators.
Conversion tracking is now opt-in (default OFF) — gtag events fire only after explicit admin opt-in.
Friendly Captcha widget is now self-hosted under assets/js/vendor/ instead of loaded from an external CDN.
Removed plugin “Powered by” link from the admin header.
Hardened SQL preparation, input sanitization, output escaping, and nonce verification across all admin and REST surfaces.

1.0.1

PHPCS / Plugin Check sweep — SQL prepare, input sanitization, nonce verification, file system operations.

1.0.0

Initial public release.