EXCELLENT Plugin

Update: There is an easy fix for making the posts publicly queryable. Use any custom post plugin to make the custom post type that you want and then map the CF7 fields to your existing post type. That way all the CF7 posts can be perfectly viewed from the URL.

The downside is that if you create custom meta fields, they do not show up in the plugin currently. So you can only map CF7 fields to default WordPress fields and that’s a big downside. So any help with making the custom meta fields visible in the plugin would be much appreciated.

P.S. I used Custom Post Type UI plugin to make the custom post type and then Advanced Custom Fields to make my custom meta fields.

Hi @awesiome,

I like your ingenious way round the problem, but I would still recommend that you understand a little more about what constitutes a ‘publicly queryable post’. The codex page is an excellent place to start. However, as you can appreciate from the linked page, custom posts are complex and their nature & behaviour is finely controlled by a whole range of parameters. This plugin by default makes your mapped custom post only visible in the dashboard, and not in the front-end for security purpose.

However, all the parameters of the newly registered posts can be filtered using the hooks,

• cf7_2_post_supports_{$post_type}
• cf7_2_post_capabilities_{$post_type}
• ‘cf7_2_post_register_post_{post_type}’

you can find detailed examples in the plugin page.

If you are unsure about what post parameters to filter, I suggest the excellent WordPress Stackexchange forum.

The downside is that if you create custom meta fields, they do not show up in the plugin currently. So you can only map CF7 fields to default WordPress fields and that’s a big downside. So any help with making the custom meta fields visible in the plugin would be much appreciated.

all meta fields are saved to your database, but if by not visible in the dashboard you mean that you cannot see them in your post edit page, then that’s because you have not enabled any custom metabox to display them. Here is a good tutorial how to do this.

Maybe in a future development of this plugin I might create automatic metabox for custom posts, but for now it is beyond my means,

Let me know if you need more information.

It turns out that there was a bug in the code, some of the registration attributes were not being saved properly. My apologies for this. I have updated the repo with v2.1 which fixes these issues.

I updated the FAQ section with an answer to your specific question on how to make posts publicly queryable.

Hi @aurovrata,

About the custom fields issue, I have already created the custom fields using the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. Your plugin can display custom posts in the drop down when you decide to map to an existing post.

However in the meta fields area, it sometimes displays custom meta fields and other times it doesn’t. I have not clue why. I just tested the most recent version and on one occasion the plugin detected three of my four custom meta fields and mapped the corresponding CF7 fields perfectly. However it appears to just have been a stroke of luck because although it worked for two forms, when I tried to map the third form it didn’t show me any of my custom meta fields in the drop down when I attempted to map to an existing post type. So I do not know exactly what’s going on but I’m glad two of my forms are 95% mapped successfully.

I appreciate the time taken in attaching the links to creating custom meta fields but I do not think that is the solution to the problem. The fields are already created and Post My CF7 found them on two occasions but failed after that.

Your plugin can display custom posts in the drop down when you decide to map to an existing post.

that is correct, and if you map to a custom post, you can actually type out your own meta-fields and the plugin will create them for you.

Wrt to meta fields in the dashboard, the Custom Meta Field metabox only displays the most recent fields and doesn’t do a good job of getting all your fields. I never understood why this is so. however, you can look at your DB and will find that all your meta-fields have been saved, so building your page templates to show your fields in the front-end will work.

If you want them to display properly in the dashbaord, you need to build your own metabox, there is no other way round. You can explore the meta-box plugin to see if it can create them automatically for you. I have always created mine programmatically so I have no experience with the above plugin.

The ACF plugin has a checkbox that creates a metabox for your custom fields when ticked which I have applied. The plugin interestingly is only still showing two of the four custom fields but at least now it shows the custom meta fields consistently (even though it only shows some of them)

if you map to a custom post, you can actually type out your own meta-fields and the plugin will create them for you.

In previous versions of the plugin, yes you could create your own custom fields while you configure mapping for a custom post but they would not be saved correctly (I assume this is no longer the case in the newest version although I haven’t checked.)

Overall, I could simply use the your plugin itself to create the custom post as well as the custom meta fields to solve the whole problem especially now that the publicly queryable function works. The reason I am opting to use the ACF plugin is for the amount of control it provides over custom meta fields.

I will wait patiently for updates to your plugin. Thanks for maintaining this project and not abandoning it like many developers do down the road.