Looking for a code-free way to build custom forms, quizzes, and galleries or work with custom content types on WordPress?

IAKPress is a brand new WordPress plugin that helps you build forms, quizzes, galleries, and more. It can also help you create and manage custom post types and taxonomies, which lets you unlock WordPress’ power as a full content management system.

In this hands-on IAKPress review, we’ll install this free plugin on our test site and show you everything that it can do – let’s dig in!

IAKPress Review: What Does the Plugin Do?

IAKPress perhaps could be best defined as a “builder” for WordPress in that it lets you build different things.

One primary function of IAKPress is as a form builder. With it, you can build:

• Simple contact and lead generation forms
• Multi-step forms for more complicated types of forms
• Quizzes and surveys

IAKPress can also help you build image galleries by letting you link to media files. And, if you want, you can even use it as a sort of page builder to design complete pages.

Another option is to use IAKPress to create/register custom post types and taxonomies. You can use these to store custom content.

Finally, IAKPress includes some built-in integrations to help you create more advanced forms. First, you get two built-in payment integrations for:

• Stripe
• PayPal

There’s also an SMTP integration that helps you improve the reliability of the emails that IAKPress sends on your behalf.

IAKPress Pricing

IAKPress has a free version that’s available at WordPress.org.

With the free version, you can create basic contact forms with all the basic form fields that you need to do so.

Then, there are also multiple Pro versions that add additional features for:

• Advanced forms
• Quizzes
• Photo galleries
• Multi-step forms
• Custom post types and taxonomies
• Content building

Currently, the premium version doesn’t have set prices, but I imagine that will be coming soon. As I mentioned, the plugin is brand new, so the premium version seems to still be under construction.

How to Create a Form or Quiz With IAKPress

To create a form with IAKPress, you go to IAKPress → Add. There, you can choose from the different types of forms:

• Contact & lead form
• Advanced form
• Multistep form
• Quiz form

Once you select your form type, it will launch the drag-and-drop editor. You’ll also see a list of form fields that apply to your specific form type.

To add form fields, all you do is click and drag them onto your form. There, you’ll be able to configure basic settings, like the specific field type (in some situations) and labels. For example, if you add a Text Box field, you’ll be able to choose different field types such as:

• Single line text
• Email
• Password
• URL
• Numeric
• Etc.

As you add form fields, you’ll automatically see the live preview of your form update, which is nice because you can instantly see how any changes that you make affect your form:

Some of the different high-level form elements that you get are:

• Slider – let visitors choose an input using a slider.
• Form Button – use this to let visitors interact. Typically, this will be to “Submit” the form, but you can also let people get their quiz results.
• Checkbox – let visitors check a box.
• Container Field – useful for layouts.
• Action – define what happens after someone submits the form, like sending an email notification or showing a thank you page.
• Choice List – let visitors choose from a list of options. This is especially useful for quizzes.
• Resource – embed an image in your form.
• Content – include your own text content in the form.

To further configure form fields, you can use the Field Settings and Field Style tabs.

In the Field Settings, you can configure fields, mark them as required, set validation rules, etc.

Then, in the FIeld Style tab, you can set up basic style rules for that field. IAKPress uses Bootstrap, which makes it easy to modify the field styles using CSS.

You also get some form-wide settings. For example, in the General Styling tab, you can set up form-wide colors and CSS classes. You also get a few pre-defined layouts:

Once you’re happy with your form, you can publish it to make it live.

To embed your forms, you can use:

• An editor block for Gutenberg
• A shortcode
• A PHP function

If you use the block, you’ll be able to preview your form in the editor and you’ll also be able to access the global styling options in the block sidebar, which is nice:

How to Create a Gallery With IAKPress

As I mentioned in the beginning, you can use IAKPress for more than just forms and quizzes – you can also use it to build galleries or even as a lightweight WordPress page builder.

To get started with a gallery, you’d go to IAKPress → Add just like you did before. Only now, you’ll choose the Photo Gallery option.

This will launch you into the same drag-and-drop editor, you’ll just have a more limited set of options. You can add:

• Container Field – use this for controlling your gallery’s layout.
• Resource – use this to add images. You can either add images from your Media Library or from other sources.
• Content – use this to add text content that you want to include with your gallery.

When you insert a Resource, you’ll be able to choose from a single image or an image list. For a gallery, you’ll probably want to choose an image list, which lets you display multiple images:

Once you select Image List, you can go to the Choice List tab to add images. You can also configure the number of columns and some other settings for your gallery. As you make changes, the visual preview will automatically update:

Once you’re finished, you can embed the gallery using the same methods that I showed you in the previous section.

How to Work With Custom Content and Designs Using IAKPress

In addition to building forms and content layouts, IAKPress can also help you create custom content in the form of custom post types and custom taxonomies.

If you add a custom post type, you can first enter some basic details. For example, here’s what it might look like for a “Movie” custom post type:

Once you create it, you’ll get additional options to configure how it works. You can also see the new Movies post type in the WordPress dashboard sidebar:

You can also add custom taxonomies and associate them with any post type. For example, you could add a “Genre” taxonomy for the Movies custom post type. This helps you group your custom content:

And there’s your general overview for how the IAKPress plugin works!

Thoughts On How IAKPress Could Improve

IAKPress tries to do a lot of different things, which can make it feel a little unfocused. In trying to do forms, galleries, landing pages, and custom post types, I’m not sure what the focus is and how everything comes together.

I think focusing on one area first would make the value proposition clearer and then IAKPress can expand once it gets established. Having one plugin that does multiple things well is very difficult and requires time and resources – most of the other plugins that hit this “multi use” approach have done so after years of building up features and a customer base. Elementor started with a page builder, then added theme building, then popup building, etc.

For example, maybe start out by trying to just be the best form plugin, instead of taking on gallery plugins too. Right now, a specialized gallery plugin is going to be a better option for galleries for most people, so it’s tough for IAKPress to compete when it’s trying to do everything.

I’d also like to see a little more focus on user-friendliness. While IAKPress does deliver on its promise of code-free forms and building, it lags behind in user experience as compared to some of the popular alternatives on the market.

I struggled to figure out how everything came together. For example, when building a form, the Action settings act like a separate field in the form, which is a little bit confusing for me as the actions are not something a visitor interacts with. I think it would make more sense to give these actions their own settings area, which is how most form plugins do it.

I also found the terminology to be confusing. For example, if you want to include an image in your form, you include a Resource, which isn’t where I would expect to find that feature.

Similarly, after creating a custom post type, it launched a form builder interface, but it didn’t give any instructions for what this form does. Is the form to create a front-end submission form for the custom post type? For something else? Some guidance here would be useful.

Overall, I think that some type of welcome wizard or onboarding guide would make the plugin much more user-friendly, as well as a redesign of the interface to make it more logical for a new user. As it is now, I struggled to put everything together in a way that let me take advantage of the plugin’s features.

Test IAKPress for Yourself

Overall, IAKPress is brand new, so it has plenty of room to grow going forward.

If you’d like to test it out yourself, you can download the free version from WordPress.org and play around with it. Then, consider the premium version for even more features: