WordPress 5.5 has introduced the auto-update feature for plugins and themes. Keeping plugins and themes updated to the latest version is a key factor in managing your WordPress site securely. We strongly recommend you enable auto-updates for the Contact Form 7 plugin, but you should also be aware that there are risks involved in the use of auto-updates.
Continue reading Heads-up about auto-updatesDevelopment moves to GitHub
The development repository of Contact Form 7 has moved to GitHub. The GitHub repository lets you:
- Browse the code in development branches;
- Trace back through the development logs;
- Contribute to the development by reporting issues and making pull requests;
- And more!
The release repository will continue to be on the WordPress.org Plugin Directory’s SVN-based system as before.
Contact Form 7 5.2.1
Contact Form 7 5.2.1 is now available. This is a maintenance release that includes several improvements and bug fixes. Contact Form 7 5.2.1 is also the first release that has been tested with WordPress 5.5.
Continue reading Contact Form 7 5.2.1Flamingo 2.2
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 5.1.8