Contact Form 8

CF8 is now deprecated, retired, and abandoned.

Contact Form 8 has been retired and is not 100% Wordpress 3.0 compatible. Please use Contact Form 7 instead, after carefully following the instructions below. I apologize for the trouble.

Moving Back to Contact Form 7

1. Back up your Wordpress database in case your contact forms are deleted in the transition! This is important!

2. Seriously, back up.

3. Install, but do not activate, Contact Form 7.

4. Deactivate, but do not delete, Contact Form 8.

5. Activate CF7 and check to make sure your forms are still there.

6. Manually (e.g. via FTP or SSH) delete the folder "contact-form-8" from wp-content/plugins. Warning: There is a chance that using the Wordpress Admin’s delete plugin functionality, your forms will be deleted. This is because Contact Form 8 used the same data as Contact Form 7. I apologize for this oversight; I should have had CF8 copy form data instead of using it in-place.

7. Check your forms are still intact (they will be unless you did not follow the last step correctly). If they are gone, quickly restore the data you backed up in step 1.

Now, if you used Contact Form 8's checkboxes with their lovely automatic line breaks, you’ll need to do a few things to get your Contact Form 7-based checkboxes unjammed from each other:

8. Add this line to your stylesheet:

   .wpcf7-list-item { display: block; }
   

   This makes checkboxes take their own line, like they did in Contact Form 8, instead of crowding together.



9. Add use_label_element to your checkbox codes. This allows users to click text next to checkboxes to toggle the checkbox itself, as they were able to with Contact Form 8.

   For example, you would change

   [checkbox how-heard-cf2 "Web Search" "Other"]
   

   to

   [checkbox how-heard-cf2 use_label_element "Web Search" "Other"]
   

   The placement of the string within the field code may matter. Use the CF7 code generator if you have a problem.

Let me know if you have problems moving to Contact Form 7 from CF8, and I'll be sure to update these instructions.

Why Has Contact Form 8 Been Retired?

Why have I decided to discontinue Contact Form 8 development?

• Some CF8 functionality is now broken in Wordpress 3.0.  Users may not see confirmation that their message has been sent correctly.

  Note that the problem CF8 displays in Wordpress 3.0 seems to currently (as of 2010-07-01) afflict Contact Form 7 as well, but considering Takayuki’s stellar track record in providing timely updates, I do not expect this problem to last long.

• Contact Form 7 now includes functionality akin to that provided by my fork. (Thank Takayuki for being such a good plugin maintainer!)

(Retired Plugin) Legacy CF8 Description

Contact Form 8 is based on Takayuki Miyoshi’s Contact Form 7 version 2.0.1. Contact Form 8 has better support for checkboxes (clickable labels, actually separate onto different lines).

This is done by creating guaranteed-unique id attributes for checkboxes so the for attribute of the checkboxes' labels may be set (automatically, of course). Per the HTML spec, this means clicking on the label checks or unchecks the checkbox (or radio button).

I did not "upgrade" Contact Form 7's handling of other input types like <input type="text" /> because it is already possible to set an ID and manually create a label for such items, and automatically generating labels would break existing Contact Form 7 forms.

Please note that Contact Form 7 and Contact Form 8 should not be activated at the same time. They use the same set of data. The positive side of this is that existing Contact Form 7 installations, including custom forms and shortcodes, are retained and undamaged when upgrading to Contact Form 8. (This may change if Contact Form 7 undergoes serious changes in the future and Contact Form 8 does not.)

The project is ready for you to fork or download from GitHub.

It is also available from Wordpress.

You can see my other projects here or my other WordPress plugins here.

Please Use the forum for Contact Form 7 for help unless your issue relates to the upgraded checkboxes and radio buttons of Contact Form 8, specifically. In that case, please use the Contact Form 8 forum. Thank you.