“As of right now, there are more than five million active websites, with this plugin and if you consider the most popular WordPress plugins of all time, you’ll see it’s number one on the list”, said HowDoDesign.com, one of the most known web design tutorial sites in the entire industry . Part of the reason it is at the very best, is that it was among the first contact kinds out there.
It is not the prettiest plugin since it’s so old but it produces a contact form is effective.
If you search for Contact Form 7 in the plugin directory, you will see a range of add-ons, some of which are created by the first author and a few of which can be constructed by the community. We’ll be taking a look at some of these later in this chapter.
The customization here is just one of the excellent things about Contact Form 7 since every piece of functionality is done on your WordPress site, that means that you can customize every little bit of it. A perfect example is, some time ago a customer wanted me to create an integration involving Contact Form 7 and a Mailpoet.
I did so and released it at no cost on WordPress.org. And eventually I passed the plugin on to its current maintainer. However, it’s so incredibly powerful to have the ability to fix your own problems from the WordPress space.
It’s possible to code them yourself or you could pay somebody to do it for you. The sky is your limit. Let us go to our website and find this plugin installed. Proceed to my website, I am currently at plugins, and I have disabled Jetpack. We are going to go to add fresh. And let us look for Contact Form 7.
Now we are ready to make the form.
Contact Form 7 is extremely different from Jetpack’s Contact Form. Rather than going to a webpage and adding a form right on this page, we actually create the form in another admin area, and then we copy and paste a brief code in that page. Let us go to Contact at the Admin menu that is where we will see a listing of our Contact kinds.
There are some things that bug me about Contact Form 7 but the author has done a fantastic job on this page pointing you to instruction and to correct some of these problems.
You may notice that right here Contact Form 7 has made a form for us. This is exactly what the default contact form resembles in Touch Form 7. Therefore, if you clicked Add New, you would see exactly the same thing.
This seems very different than Jetpack. We see a name up here and then we see a list of tags and a few shortcodes down here. We are going to cover how to customize these form fields in an upcoming movie, but for right now I wish to show you how you can embed this contact form on a webpage.
We are going to use this shortcode right here and I will copy and paste it. Then we are going to visit one of our webpages. Proceed to Pages. I’ll be certain to eliminate our preceding Contact Form from Jetpack since that doesn’t longer function.
And I will paste in our new shortcode. Now what is kind of nice about using shortcodes in this way is that any place we add the shortcode we’ll see exactly the same Contact Form. Therefore, if you wanted this Contact Form to be on three or four pages that you can just copy and paste the exact same item on those three or four pages and they would all work and display.
1 thing to note: if you are using an older version of Contact Form 7 that the shortcode is just like Jetpack shortcode so in case you have both installed you may have some difficulties displaying the perfect form at the ideal time, and this report will tell you how you can repair that issue.
Let us return to our page and let us update our page using a new shortcode. Let us examine the form so we can see exactly what the information looks like. So I will go to my Contact page. I will scroll down. And there is our form.
Here is my name, my email, let us do the subject. And needless to say, our message. And just to show you what the error validation looks like, let us leave one of those fields blank only for right now. And let us click Send. So there’s some wonderful error validation.
Thank you, your message was sent. 1 thing to notice here: if you receive an error message which states, “There was an error trying to send your message.” Then it is probably an issue sending email, so be certain that your SMTP plugin is installed properly. For a little more information about the error, you can visit this page.
