by Marcel Pol 4.8 (113 reviews)

Gwolle Guestbook

Name: Gwolle Guestbook
Rating: 4.8 (113 reviews)
Author: Marcel Pol

Gwolle Guestbook is the WordPress guestbook you've just been looking for. Beautiful and easy.

Gwolle Guestbook ranks #1,146 among WordPress.org plugins with 20,000+ active installations, is #67 of 2,578 in the Contact Forms category, a 4.8/5 rating from 113 reviews, and was last updated Aug 21, 2026. Data from WordPress.org, refreshed twice daily — see methodology.

Compatible with WP 7.1

v5.1.0 Current Version v5.1.0

Updated 3 weeks ago Last Update on 21 Aug, 2026

Refreshed 10 hours ago Last Refreshed on

#67 of 2,578 in Contact Forms Top 5% by installs Downloads -39.2% this week Actively maintained

View on WordPress.org

Rank

#1,146

— No change

Active Installs

20K+

-30.4%

KW Avg Position

7.4

0.2 worse

Downloads

1.6M

+31 today

Support Resolved

50%

— No change

Rating

96%

Review 4.8 out of 5

4.8 (113 reviews)

Next Milestone 30K

Total Progress 85.2%

20K+ 30K+

Ranks to Climb

Growth Needed

8,000,000

Active Installs

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Rank Changes

Current #1,146

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Active Installs Growth

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Active Installs 0,000,000+

Growth +0.0%

Peak 0,000,000

Downloads Growth

Downloads

Growth

Peak

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Reviews & Ratings

4.8

113 reviews

Overall 96%

101 (89%)

6 (5%)

3 (3%)

1 (1%)

2 (2%)

Support Threads Overview

Resolved

Unresolved

Total Threads

Resolved

Unresolved

50%

Resolution Rate

Security History

Source: WPVulnerability

10 known vulnerabilities on record · 2 in the last 24 months · checked 1 week ago

Jul 9, 2025

Gwolle Guestbook [gwolle-gb] < 4.9.3

CVE-2025-5807 · Fixed in v4.9.3
Jan 31, 2025

Gwolle Guestbook [gwolle-gb] < 4.7.2

CVE-2025-24710 · Fixed in v4.7.2
Nov 23, 2021

Gwolle Guestbook [gwolle-gb] < 4.2.0

CVE-2021-24980 · Fixed in v4.2.0
Aug 9, 2018

Gwolle Guestbook [gwolle-gb] < 2.5.4

Fixed in v2.5.4
Jul 28, 2018

Gwolle Guestbook [gwolle-gb] < 2.5.4

CVE-2018-17884 · Fixed in v2.5.4
Mar 1, 2017

Gwolle Guestbook [gwolle-gb] < 2.1.1

Fixed in v2.1.1
Mar 1, 2017

Gwolle Guestbook [gwolle-gb] < 2.1.1

Fixed in v2.1.1
Nov 4, 2015

Gwolle Guestbook [gwolle-gb] < 1.5.4

CVE-2015-8351 · Fixed in v1.5.4
Gwolle Guestbook [gwolle-gb] < 2.1.1

Fixed in v2.1.1
Gwolle Guestbook [gwolle-gb] < 2.1.1

Fixed in v2.1.1

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Plugin Details

Version: 5.1.0
Last Updated: Aug 21, 2026
Requires WP: 4.1+
Tested Up To: 7.1
PHP Version: 7.0 or higher
Author: Marcel Pol

Support & Rating

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.8
Reviews: 113
Support Threads: 4
Resolved: 50%

Keywords

Gästebuch guest book guestbook livre d'or review

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TL;DR

AI summary of the plugin's readme

This plugin is for WordPress site owners who want a dedicated guestbook feature separate from blog comments. It solves the problem of misusing the comments section for guestbook purposes by providing a purpose-built, moderated, spam-protected guestbook system with import/export support.

Frontend guestbook form
Pagination or infinite scroll
Widget for excerpt display
Dashboard widget for entries
Import from other guestbooks
Moderation of entries
7 anti-spam features
Multisite support

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Gwolle Guestbook

You could start by writing the first entry yourself, and invite people to leave a message.

Starting with version 1.0, the following entries are listed on the Frontend: Checked Not marked as Spam Not in the Trash Before that, in 0.9.7, all the 'checked' entries were visible.

For the entries that you consider spam, but were not automatically marked as spam, you can manually mark them as spam, and they will not be visible anymore. For entries that are not spam, but you still don't want them visible, you can move them to trash. The entries that you want visible, set them to checked. I want to translate this plugin Translations can be added very easily through GlotPress. You can start translating strings there for your locale. They need to be validated though, so if there's no validator yet, and you want to apply for being validator (PTE), please post it on the support forum. I will make a request on make/polyglots to have you added as validator for this plugin/locale.

By default this plugin uses a Honeypot feature and a Timeout feature. If spambots try to post guestbook entries this should work sufficiently. If you still have problems there are more options: Honeypot feature: Hidden input field that only spambots would fill in. Form Timeout: If the form was sent in too fast after loading the page, the entry will be marked as spam. Nonce: Will verify if you really loaded the page with the form first, before posting an entry. Spambots will just submit the form without having a Nonce. Akismet: Third party spamfilter by Automattic. Works really well, but not everybody likes to use a third party service. Stop Forum Spam: Third party spamfilter. Again, works really well, but not everybody likes to use a third party service. Custom Anti-Spam question: Use a simple quiz question to test if you are human. I already use WP-SpamShield WP-SpamShield is a general plugin for anti-spam that supports the general WordPress forms and many plugins. Activating WP-SpamShield will disable the anti-spam features in Gwolle Guestbook and all anti-spam will be handled by WP-SpamShield. If you don’t want to use WP-SpamShield’s protection for Gwolle Guestbook, then all you need to do is disable Anti-Spam for Miscellaneous Forms in WP-SpamShield settings.

You can add a parameter to the shortcode, like: [gwolle_gb book_id="2"] This will make that page show all the entries in Book ID 2. In case you read this on wordpress.org, the quotes are supposed to be standard double quotes, no backticks. If you use the template function, you can use it like this: show_gwolle_gb( array('book_id'=>2) );

There is no need to use id's that are incrementing. If you have a lot of guestbooks on lots of pages, you can just use the id of the post as the id of the guestbook. That way you won't have double id's. You can set the book_id automatically to the post_id with this shortcode: [gwolle_gb book_id="post_id"] In case you read this on wordpress.org, the quotes are supposed to be standard double quotes, no backticks. I use Infinite Scroll with multiple guestbooks This is not really supported and might result in strange issues. I only want to show one entry. You can use a shortcode parameter for showing just one entry: [gwolle_gb_read entry_id="213"] In case you read this on wordpress.org, the quotes are supposed to be standard double quotes, no backticks. I don't see the labels in the form. This plugin doesn't apply any CSS to the label elements. It is possible that your label elements have a white color on a white background. You can check this with the Inspector in your browser. If that is the case, you have a theme or plugin that is applying that CSS to your label elements. Please contact them. I don't get a notification email. First check your spambox in your mailaccount. Second, on the settingspage you can change the From address for the email that is sent. Sometimes there are problems sending it from the default address, so this is a good thing to change to a real address. There are also several SMTP plugins, where you can configure a lot of settings for email. If it still doesn't work, request the maillog at your hosting provider, or ask if they can take a look. I want to show the form and the list on different pages There are different shortcodes that you can use. Instead of the '[gwolle_gb]' shortcode, you can use '[gwolle_gb_write]' for just the form, and '[gwolle_gb_read]' for the list of entries. There is also a widget that can display the latest entries in a widget area, that has many options. Alternatively you can use the shortcode '[gwolle_gb_widget]' to display the latest entries in widget layout. Parameters are: book_id, int with an ID. num_entries, int with the shown number of messages. num_words, int with the shown number of words per entry. I want to show the form immediately, without the button The shortcodes '[gwolle_gb]' and '[gwolle_gb_write]' have a parameter for the button. You can use them as '[gwolle_gb button="false"]' or '[gwolle_gb_write button="true"]', to deviate from the default. Moderation is enabled, but my entry is marked as checked If a user with capability of 'gwolle_gb_moderate_comments' posts an entry, it will be marked as checked by default, because he can mark it as checked anyway. Moderation is disabled, but some entries are still unchecked There is validation of the length of words in the content and author name. If the words are too long and it looks abusive, it will be marked as unchecked. A moderator will still be needed to manually edit and check these entries.

You can refresh your rewrite rules, by going to Settings / Permalinks, and save your permalinks again. This will most likely add the rewrite rule for the RSS Feed. I use a caching plugin, and my entries are not visible after posting

If it doesn't on your setup, please let me know which caching plugin you use, and support for it might be added. You can also refresh or delete your cache manually. Most caching plugins offer support for that. I use a Multi-Lingual plugin There are 2 settings that you need to pay attention to. If you saved the settings for the form tab, you should save an empty header and notice text. It will fill in the default there after saving, but that is okay. As long as you saved an empty option, or it is still not-saved, then it will show the translated text from your MO file. Also, you will want to use the book_id parameter of the shortcode for multiple guestbooks. I use a theme with AJAX Using a theme with AJAX navigation can give issues. Only on the guestbook page is the JavaScript and CSS loaded. So you would need to load it on every page to have it available for the guestbook. You can add the following code to functions.php of your theme: <?php add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'gwolle_gb_enqueue', 20); ?> I don't have any experience myself with AJAX themes. If it doesn't work, please contact the theme author. My theme has no styling for form fields You could use this CSS. Please adapt the colors ;) The CSS can be added in Appearance > Customizer > Custom CSS. html body div.gwolle-gb input[type="button"], html body div.gwolle-gb input[type="submit"] { color: #fff; /* white */ background-color: #f00; /* red */ border: 1px solid #0f0; /* green */ border-radius: 5px; } html body div.gwolle-gb form.gwolle-gb-write div.input input[type="text"], html body div.gwolle-gb form.gwolle-gb-write div.input input[type="email"], html body div.gwolle-gb form.gwolle-gb-write div.input input[type="url"], html body div.gwolle-gb form.gwolle-gb-write div.input textarea, html body div.gwolle-gb form.gwolle-gb-write div.input select { border: 1px solid #0f0; /* green */ border-radius: 3px; } I use the Autoptimize plugin The frontend scripts will only be loaded on the Guestbook page, so they won't be added to autoptimize. You can add 'gwolle_gb_frontend' to both the comma-separated JS and CSS autoptimization exclusion list. That way it will still be loaded right. On the autoptimize settings page, you might have to click on "show advanced settings"-button top-right first. More info on troubleshooting in AO's FAQ.

For moderating comments you need the capability 'gwolle_gb_moderate_comments'. For managing options you need the capability 'manage_options'.

You can look at 'frontend/gwolle_gb-entry.php', and copy it to your theme folder. Then it will be loaded by the plugin. Make sure you keep track of changes in the default templatefile though. It is often better to use filters, that way you are more forward-compatible.