Contact Form 7 FAQ

This post is no longer updated. Move to Contact Form 7 official site.

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(日本語の FAQ はこちら)

1. Where is the settings page for Contact Form 7?
2. How can I add a contact form into my post content?
3. How can I add a field to my contact form?
4. 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?
5. I get emails containing codes such as [foobar]. What’s this? I want to see the user’s input.
6. How can I specify a subject for the email?
7. Can I place a contact form outside a post?
8. Can I embed a contact form into my template file?
9. After submitting the form, I get an error message stating “Failed to send your message”. What is wrong?
10. I get an error message with a red border. So, how can I solve this?
11. I see a response message “Your message was sent successfully” with green border, but I never receive a mail for that.
12. The spinning arrow icon shows up once I submit a form, but then nothing happens.
13. My contact form behaves oddly on certain browsers.
14. I want to use contact form in my language, not in English. How can I do that?
15. CAPTCHA does not work; the image does not show up.
16. CAPTCHA’s text input box is working on Internet Explorer, but not with Firefox. I cannot enter the code.
17. File upload & file attachment do not work.

Where is the settings page for Contact Form 7?

Log into WordPress and open Settings > Contact Form 7.

Update: It’s in Manage > Contact Form 7 since Contact Form 7 1.8.

Update: WordPress 2.7 moved the page to Tools > Contact Form 7.

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, such as [contact-form 1 "My contact form"]. To insert the contact form into your post, copy the tag and paste it into the post content.

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 Contact Form 7 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.

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 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?

No, this functionality is not yet supported.

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 content is classified as spam by Akismet. In this case, the error message would be surrounded with a YELLOW 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 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.

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. Try deactivating all other plugins.

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, the contact-form-7/captcha/tmp folder must be writable.

Contact Form 7 1.8 and later require wp-contents/uploads/wpcf7_captcha folder writable, instead of contact-form-7/captcha/tmp.

Update (2009/03/23): Contact Form 1.9.4 and later refers your upload folder setting in Settings > Miscellaneous menu for resolving the base directory for CAPTCHA’s temporary folder. So it may not use wp-contents/uploads/wpcf7_captcha. 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.

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.

File uploading and attachment with Contact Form 7