Question: How does one go about building a page in wordpress that contains a contact form full of custom fields, boxes, inputs, etc. completely determined by the author of the site. It seems odd that wordpress currently lacks this feature, but knowing the wordpress community, it's unlikely that we must do without.

Answer: 
If you are looking to do a highly custom form, and want complete control over what happens, you can also create a new template for the page, and your form on that template would post back to itself. At the top of the template you could do something like this:

```
<?php
if($_POST)
{
     // do something
}
?>

```

Not the most elegant, but it works.
See the different- for only a form in one page it is easy and fast (no filter-hook or other) to write a template for a page in WP, for more flexibilty and functions us a plugin. A ready solution or a starter there you can find here: <https://github.com/bueltge/WP-Contact-Form-Template>