iDeasilo

Contact Form 7 1.5

Takayuki Miyoshi

I released Contact Form 7 1.5. You can use CAPTCHA on it. Russian and Brazilian Portuguese translations came in. Akismet’s usage got changed as it was confusable.

(日本語はこちら)

Before using CAPTCHA

*1 — Contact Form 7 1.8 and later use wp-contents/uploads/wpcf7_captcha as image folder.

How to use CAPTCHA

To add a CAPTCHA into your contact form, use [captchac] and [captchar] tags in the form content field in Contact Form 7’s admin page.

[captchac] means CAPTCHA-Challenge and it is replaced by an <img> element for CAPTCHA’s image. [captchar] means CAPTCHA-Response and it is replaced by an <input> element for an input field.

A [captchac] must be paired with a [captchar] with the same name. For example, tags shown below are valid.

[captchac captcha-1] [captchar captcha-1]

And your browser renders them as shown below.

I show you another as a bad example.

[captchac captcha-2] [captchar captcha-3]

They are invalid as having different names. In this case, your browser renders them as above, but the CAPTCHA never matches.

Options for [captchac] and [captchar]

To change the foreground color of a CAPTCHA, use fg option with [captchac]. Put RGB color code in hex format after fg:#. For example, set fg:#ff0000 if you want red foreground.

In the same way, use bg option to change the background color.

To change the size of a CAPTCHA, use size option with [captchac]. Only size:s (60×20), size:m (72×24) and size:l (84×28) are available. If you don’t set size option, size:m is used as default.

I show you some examples.

To change the size of an input field, use size/maxlength option with [captchar].

For example, if you want an input field with 40 as size and 100 as max length, add a tag shown below.

[captchar captcha-1 40/100]

And all available options for [text] are also available for [captchar].

Russian and Brazilian Portuguese translations

Russian (by Dmitry Volotovich) and Brazilian Portuguese (by Leonardo Pinheiro) translations came in. Thank you very much!

Now Contact Form 7 has translations in the following languages.

If you have a translation in a language not listed above, please let me know.

New usage of Akismet

Since I released Contact Form 7 1.4, I have got a ton of messages from users saying that Contact Form 7 stop sending mails after they turned on Akismet option on it. In most cases, the problem was that they have not added necessary options (akismet:author, akismet:author_email and akismet:author_url) for using Akismet properly.

I considered the fact that so many users got confused, and decided to change the usage.

Contact Form 7 1.5 always sends information to Akismet server if:

  1. You have activated Akismet plugin, and
  2. You have added at least one of options for Akismet (akismet:author, akismet:author_email and akismet:author_url).

I removed Apply Akismet checkbox from admin page as it is not necessary anymore.

For beginners, I show you how to use Akismet on Contact Form 7.

Step 1. You need Akismet plugin. If you have not activated it yet, activate it first.

Step 2. Open Contact Form 7’s admin page and edit form content field as:

  1. Add akismet:author option to the tag of field which requires sender’s name.
    Example: [text* your-name akismet:author]
  2. Add akismet:author_email option to the tag of field which requires sender’s email address.
    Example: [email* your-email akismet:author_email]
  3. Add akismet:author_url option to the tag of field which requires sender’s URL.
    Example: [text your-url akismet:author_url]

That’s all.

Sender’s all input and many other information related to the inputting activity are sent to Akismet server. Then Akismet judges whether it is likely to be a spam.

See also: How to use Akismet on Contact Form 7 (Contact Form 7 1.4 release announcement; available except outdated Step 1-3)