Why I wrote this plugin?

You may appreciate that this plugin extension to the popular contact form 7 does a lot of things. However, one of the prime motivations to write this plugin was based on the need to adopt and work with a single form plugin for all my projects, I chose CF7 for various reason which I have elucidated in this thread. In addition to this I have been confronted to the issue of form design/layout, having to style forms repeatedly to get compact designs which are responsive, and hence decided to write this plugin.

Moreover, The CF7 plugin was initially written when WP core provided very little hooks for admin integration. this constrained the CF7 author to create custom admin pages for managing the form table and form editor. As a result, many CF7 extensions require non-WP-std code to get to add functionality on top of CF7, sometimes to the point to awkward code constructs.

A few years back, I requested and offered to help the CF7 author to re-write the plugin but with no success. My wife happens to come from the same town as him and when visiting my in-laws I requested to visit him at his office, again with no success. In order to achieve the initial goals of this plugin, I really needed to bring the cf7 plugin back into WP-std territory, and I therefore embarked on a re-write of the dashboard interface. If you look carefully at the form table page it is using the WP edit.php file, and when you edit a form it now uses the WP post.php file. The rest of the CF7 plugin is unaffected.

This has a huge impact in enabling other plugins to play nice with CF7, especially plugins which are initially not designed with CF7 in mind, but rather assume a WP-std coding approach (eg WPML, Polyang plugins which rely on WP stds to provide multilingual post management). However, in order to ensure that existing CF7 extensions work with this plugin I have maintained the hooks provided in the CF7 plugin custom dashboard pages, but the philosophy is quite different, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some existing plugins (like those reported here and here) things don’t work out-of-the-box.

So if you appreciate the work and philosophy behind this plugin, please bear with me as I gradually fix issues reported, and hopefully provide us all with some useful functionality to cf7 which is otherwise a wonderful form plugin. Oh, and please leave a review, or buy me a beer or two, constructive feedback is always appreciated.

• This topic was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Aurovrata Venet. Reason: typo + link