- Where is the settings page for Contact Form 7?
- How can I add a contact form into my post content?
- My contact form doesn’t appear. Instead, a code
[contact-form-7 404 "Not Found"]appears. - How can I add a field to my contact form?
- Nothing shows up in the email, even after adding a tag to the form! How can I include a new field’s input in the email?
- I get emails containing codes such as [foobar]. What’s this? I want to see the user’s input.
- Are there any reserved or unavailable words for the name of an input field?
- How can I specify a subject for the email?
- Can I see the messages submitted through the contact form?
- Can I implement autoresponder?
- Mail that comes through the contact form shows “WordPress” as its sender name. How can I change this?
- Can I place a contact form outside a post?
- Can I embed a contact form into my template file?
- After submitting the form, I get an error message stating “Failed to send your message”. What is wrong?
- I get an error message with a red border. So, how can I solve this?
- I get an error message with an orange border even though I don’t use Akismet.
- I see a response message “Your message was sent successfully” with green border, but I never receive a mail for that.
- My contact form always redirects to 404 error page after submission.
- The spinning arrow icon shows up once I submit a form, but then nothing happens.
- My contact form behaves oddly on certain browsers.
- I want to use contact form in my language, not in English. How can I do that?
- CAPTCHA does not work; the image does not show up.
- CAPTCHA’s text input box is working on Internet Explorer, but not with Firefox. I cannot enter the code.
- File upload & file attachment do not work.
- Does Contact Form 7 support HTML5 input types?
- Why does my email address input field look different than other text input fields?
Where is the settings page for Contact Form 7?
Log into WordPress and open Contact > Edit.
How can I add a contact form into my post content?
Open the settings page for Contact Form 7, and then open the contact form you want to add.
Each contact form has its own tag (shortcode), such as [contact-form-7 id="1234" title="Contact form 1"]. To insert the contact form into your post, copy the shortcode and paste it into the post content.
My contact form doesn’t appear. Instead, a code [contact-form-7 404 "Not Found"] appears.
The code [contact-form-7 404 "Not Found"] is a sign that the contact form specified by the shortcode (described above) couldn’t be found. Make sure you are using the correct shortcode.
How can I add a field to my contact form?
To add a field, add a tag to the Form textarea.
Each tag has a strict syntax, supporting several options (see Tag Syntax).
Learning the syntax might be difficult, but you can easily make a custom tag by using the tag generator instead. Click Generate Tag and simply select the options you’re interested in.
Nothing shows up in the email, even after adding a tag to the form! How can I include a new field’s input in the email?
You need to add a new tag to the Mail fields. This tag should correspond to the tag in the Form you wish to include in the email. Thus, when you add a new form tag such as [text your-new-field], the corresponding email tag would be [your-new-field]. Only the second part of the tag (“your-new-field”, in this case) is needed for the email.
A tag in the Mail field will be replaced with the user’s input contained in a form field with the same name.
I get emails containing codes such as [foobar]. What’s this? I want to see the user’s input.
See above. In this case, no form tag corresponds to the [foobar] email tag. A tag in the Mail field which has no corresponding tag in the Form will be left without replacement.
Are there any reserved or unavailable words for the name of an input field?
Yes, there are some words that are not available; but this is actually not a restriction of Contact Form 7, but a restriction of WordPress.
If you post an input field with a name that is the same as a parameter name already used in a WordPress query, WordPress will confuse them, so you can’t use that name.
For example, ‘name’ is used in the query, so ‘name’ is not available for a field name. The best practice in avoiding unavailable names is adding a prefix or suffix to the name, for example, use ‘your-name’ or ‘name-1234′ instead of ‘name.’
How can I specify a subject for the email?
Simply edit the Subject field in the Mail section (not in the Form section).
Can I see the messages submitted through the contact form?
Contact Form 7 doesn’t save the submitted messages. To manage messages through Contact Form 7, you need to install Flamingo (another plugin created by the same developer).
Can I implement autoresponder?
Yes, of course. Simply check the “Use mail (2)” box in your form configuration panel. Mail (2) is almost the same as Mail, except that Mail (2) is sent only when Mail has been sent successfully.
Mail that comes through the contact form shows “WordPress” as its sender name. How can I change this?
A sender’s address is comprised of a sender’s email address and an optional sender name. WordPress assigns “WordPress” as a sender name if the settings have not been formatted. If you want to use another name so that “WordPress” no longer appears as your sender name, you must explicitly set the sender name in the ‘From:’ field in the ‘Mail’ section as the following:
Sender Name <sender@example.com>Can I place a contact form outside a post?
Yes. You may place a contact form in a text widget as well.
Can I embed a contact form into my template file?
Yes, but you cannot insert a contact form shortcode into your template file directly. You will need to pass the code into do_shortcode() function and display its output like this:
<?php echo do_shortcode( '[contact-form-7 id="1234" title="Contact form 1"]' ); ?>
After submitting the form, I get an error message stating “Failed to send your message”. What is wrong?
There could be two causes for this. The first is actual mail server trouble, where email cannot be sent. In this case, the error message would be surrounded with a RED border line. Contact your server admin.
The second possible cause is that the form submission is under suspicion of spam. In this case, the error message would be surrounded with an ORANGE border line.
I get an error message with a red border. So, how can I solve this?
There are really various reasons for server side problems, so I can’t explain exactly what yours is. But experiences of other users who solved their problem might be helpful for you.
Mario Vargas says he solved a mail-related problem with WP-Mail-SMTP plugin.
I get an error message with an orange border even though I don’t use Akismet.
The orange border is a sign of spam.
Akismet, the spam filtering plugin, used to be the only reason for this orange border, but on the Contact Form 7 3.1 (or later versions), the error message with the orange border occurs for multiple reasons.
Contact Form 7 3.1 has introduced nonce verification for contact forms. If the verification fails, Contact Form 7 treats the form submission as spam. This can occasionally cause false-positives when using cache plugins. When an old cache file remains for longer than 24 hours, nonce verification will fail, and you’ll see an error with an orange border.
To solve this problem, make sure you have the appropriate garbage collection (clean-up) settings in the cache plugin. The cache should be emptied frequently (less than 24 hours). The configuration varies in different cache plugins. Consult your cache plugin’s support for details.
I see a response message “Your message was sent successfully” with green border, but I never receive a mail for that.
Showing the green border message means that the PHP function for sending the mail has certainly completed successfully. So if you can’t receive the mail, it’s highly possible that the mail has been kidnapped or killed after that.
If you can check the log of your mail server, it could give you some clues. Spam filter often causes this kind of problem.
My contact form always redirects to 404 error page after submission.
This problem is caused by a combination of two misconfigurations. First, AJAX JavaScript is not functioning on your contact form. Due to this problem, your contact form needlessly redirects after submission. Second, your contact form uses unavailable words in the names of input fields. This issue confuses WordPress, resulting in the 404 (“Not Found”) error.
The spinning arrow icon shows up once I submit a form, but then nothing happens.
This is most probably due to a conflict between plugins/theme. Try deactivating all other plugins and switching to the default theme.
My contact form behaves oddly on certain browsers.
This may be caused due to invalid HTML, CSS, or Javascript. Please check your form page with a validator or debugging tool.
Useful tools:
Firebug — Firefox extension. Good for Javascript debugging.
XHTML-CSS Validator — A validator with a good UI.
I want to use contact form in my language, not in English. How can I do that?
Contact Form 7 has been translated into many languages. See if the languages folder contains a language file for your language.
The locale setting of Contact Form 7 follows the locale setting of WordPress. Once you change the WordPress locale to, Contact Form 7 is also changed. See how to change the WordPress locale here.
CAPTCHA does not work; the image does not show up.
To use CAPTCHA, you need GD and FreeType library installed on your server.
Also, make sure that CAPTCHA’s temporary folder is writable. Contact Form 7 refers your upload folder setting in Settings > Media menu for resolving the base directory for CAPTCHA’s temporary folder. For example, when your upload folder is set “wp-content/myfiles”, CAPTCHA temp files will be created in wp-content/myfiles/wpcf7_captcha, so you need to make that folder writable.
See also: Tips for troubleshooting Really Simple Captcha issues
CAPTCHA’s text input box is working on Internet Explorer, but not with Firefox. I cannot enter the code.
This is a well-known issue caused by misusing the <label> element. Make sure you are using it correctly.
This is good:
[captchac your-captcha]
<label>Enter the code: [captchar your-captcha]</label>This will not work correctly:
<label>[captchac your-captcha]
Enter the code: [captchar your-captcha]</label>File upload & file attachment do not work.
See this post.
Does Contact Form 7 support HTML5 input types?
Yes. Contact Form 7 3.4 and higher support form-tags corresponding to these HTML5 input types: email, tel, url, number, range and date.
If you don’t wish to use HTML5 input types, you can disable this by adding the following code into your theme’s functions.php file:
add_filter( 'wpcf7_support_html5', '__return_false' );
Why does my email address input field look different than other text input fields?
In HTML5, the email input field is represented as <input type="email" />. The text input field is represented as <input type="text" />. There is a difference in the ‘type’ attribute value.
Review your theme’s CSS style sheets. You will find some items using attribute selector like this:
input[type="text"]
{
...
}
This ‘input[type="text"]‘ selector doesn’t match the email field because it doesn’t have the ‘text’ type. If you wish to apply this style rule to email fields as well, add a selector that matches email fields:
input[type="text"],
input[type="email"]
{
...
}
See also: Styling Contact Form
