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: 
[Contact Form 7](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/) is one of the most popular plugins to add a contact form to a WP blog. It supports multiple contact forms and you can add/remove fields as needed. Additional services such as reCAPTCHA and Akismet can be added. I use this on most of my blogs to power the contact features.
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.