Flamingo 2.2 is now available. 2.2 has been tested with WordPress 5.5, which is going to be released in a few weeks. Integration with Contact Form 7 has been much improved. I recommend that you upgrade to 2.2 soon.
Continue reading Flamingo 2.2Accessing user input data
To access user input posted through a contact form, you can refer to PHP’s native global variable $_POST
. Besides this, Contact Form 7’s WPCF7_Submission
class provides a different data source ($posted_data
) that can be used to access user input. What are the differences between $_POST
and $posted_data
? And which one should you use for your purpose?
Custom spam filtering
Spam protection is mission-critical for web forms. The Contact Form 7 plugin provides several types of spam protection modules to effectively block submission by spammers.
Just like other parts of Contact Form 7, its spam-filtering feature is designed to be highly customizable. In this recipe, I’ll show you how to implement a custom spam filter with simple coding examples.
Continue reading Custom spam filteringContact Form 7 5.2
Contact Form 7 5.2 is now available. This is the first major update in 20 months and includes a lot of improvements and bug fixes. I recommend that you upgrade immediately.
Notice that Contact Form 7 5.2 requires WordPress 5.3 or greater to work. Since WordPress 5.3 requires PHP 5.6.20+ (WordPress recommends PHP 7.4+), Contact Form 7 5.2 cannot work in the PHP 5.2 to 5.5 environments.
Continue reading Contact Form 7 5.2Sharing reCAPTCHA API keys and tokens
With Contact Form 7’s reCAPTCHA (v3) integration ability, you can protect your contact forms from spambots. Since a spambot targets everything—not only contact forms—you may also want to protect other components on your website (such as comment forms) using reCAPTCHA technology.
Fortunately, Contact Form 7’s reCAPTCHA integration is designed to be open and accessible to other components. In this recipe, I’ll tell you how you can retrieve reCAPTCHA API keys and tokens from Contact Form 7 and reuse the data within your own reCAPTCHA plugin.
Continue reading Sharing reCAPTCHA API keys and tokensContact Form 7 5.1.9
Contact Form 7 5.1.9 is now available. This is a maintenance release that includes a few bug fixes.
Continue reading Contact Form 7 5.1.9Contact Form 7 5.1.8
Contact Form 7 5.1.8 is now available. This is a maintenance release that includes several bug fixes and improvements.
Continue reading Contact Form 7 5.1.8New official logo
I’m excited to present Contact Form 7’s official logo!

This elegant, minimalistic logo was designed by Cheung Vong, an artist, designer, developer, and long-time user of Contact Form 7. For more than ten years since its beginning, Contact Form 7 has had no official logo. Now I can say proudly, “This is our logo!” Thank you for your great work, Cheung!
What’s the mountain?
The mountain seen in the icon is Mount Fuji. Because I have used Hokusai’s old print art as a temporary logo for many years, and users are familiar with the image, I asked the designer to continue using Mount Fuji as a motif in the new logo.
Contact Form 7 5.1.7
Contact Form 7 5.1.7 is now available. This is a maintenance release that includes some improvements.
5.1.7 is the first Contact Form 7 release tested with WordPress 5.4. WordPress 5.4 is scheduled to be released on March 31st.
Continue reading Contact Form 7 5.1.7Heads-up about spreadsheet vulnerabilities
Vulnerabilities affecting spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice Calc have been known to exist for over 5 years, and unfortunately they seem to be still unresolved.
While it is not a vulnerability of WordPress, or its plugins, because there must be so many users of our products who are at risk of these vulnerabilities, and the damage from it could be huge, I think I should write an article here to alert you of the issue.
Continue reading Heads-up about spreadsheet vulnerabilities