Nice to be able to see submissions, but missing edit functionality…

Flamingo adds a desperately needed feature to CF7 to allow you to save form submissions as entries and there’s not much to it. It works like it says it’s going to. That being said, there are some issues and they really take away from it being an excellent solution:

1. The default view of the plugin is the “Address Book” view which shows the contact information of anyone that submitted the form. This is pretty much useless and doesn’t even make sense. If you’re using WordPress as a customer database, there are much more robust plugins for this. Especially since this address book view doesn’t show any submission info, it’s a bit pointless.

2. In order to change the information that’s submitted with Flamingo, you have to use custom Flamingo data options. You can’t just select which pieces of data Flamingo uses, you have to manually type out the data into the “Additional Settings” section of each form. It still works to do what you probably want to do, but it’s so clumsy and clunky that I hesitate to suggest it.

3. You can’t edit submissions or add any custom information to them. The submission view is pretty much read-only and, even though each submission has a link that says “Edit” and the details view says “Update Message”, there is neither a way to edit the submission nor a way to update the message in a submission. Ideally, you’d be able to modify these submissions, in the event that someone made a mistake, and have some place to put your own notes or information for each. Sadly, neither case is true.

4. There’s no way to group form data. Sure, there’s a dropdown that allows you to “filter” out the submissions from a specific form but this dropdown resets every time you switch to a different page. If you’re checking a series of submissions and need to see the details for one of them, click on the details pulls you out of the filter. You have to go back to all the messages and re-filter them again to see the messages. It would be much nicer to be able to group submissions based on the form that submitted them and then *just* view the submissions from that form.

All in all, this is better than what’s included in just CF7, but it seems like a quick and lazy solution rather than a good solution. It could be better and, for its sake, I hope that it does get a little better. Otherwise, it’s time to look for a completely different form solution and just stop using CF7 *and* Flamingo.