The iAssistant is an AssistU trained virtual assistant who also writes instructional ebooks about WordPress plugins.
Archive for Contact Form 7
The Easiest Way To Move A Blog
Posted by: | CommentsWhen I first started thinking about moving this blog to a new domain, I was really dreading it. I’m not that tech savvy, and in the past, moving my WordPress blogs have caused my sites to be down for several days. Since I sell two ebooks about plugins, Contact Form 7 and Subscribe2, on this site, I certainly didn’t want it to go down at all!
So, I started doing all the research ahead of time to ensure a smooth move. After purchasing Thesis and realizing it had quite a learning curve, I went to the DIY forum. I thought that migrating this blog to My WP Works, a Thesis site, might be harder than I thought.
Within a few minutes, pbarron on this thread, had answered my question. It was unbelievably easy! Just a few simple steps and all my blog posts and images were in place on the new domain.
To move the plugins, I went into my cpanel’s File Manager and copied and pasted them to the new domain. Many of them needed no setup at all, a few did. And some still don’t work. More on that later. I’m not sure how many of them I’ll need because Thesis has so many gadgets built into it.
My new site was up in seconds. I’m still amazed. There were a few glitches, like the permalinks. I couldn’t get them to work, but it was my own dizziness. I had set the permalink to custom: /%post-name%/. It should have been: /%postname%/. Once I did that, everything worked exactly as it should.
Don’t forget to go into Dashboard/Settings and change the General, Writing, Reading, and anything else that would be set up with a first-time installation. Otherwise, the information for the new blog will read for the previous one.
I’ve discovered my Contact Form 7 forms don’t work, but haven’t had time to investigate why. It seems that every Thesis page is a blog page with a place for comments. Maybe that’s why. I’ll get back to you on that.
My list of email subscribers in Subscribe2 didn’t move to the new domain, but there weren’t that many so I’ll transfer them manually. Any of you want to sign up? 
Bye for now, talk with you soon!
Spam Fighter – Acceptance Checkbox
Posted by: | CommentsI had never thought about it until Takayuki suggested it, but adding an acceptance checkbox to your custom CF7 form is just one more barrier between you and those wish-they’d-give-up spammers.
Not only does it serve to remind the site visitor of your Terms of Service (you do have one, right?), but that one extra step, that manual clicking in the checkbox, is another way of screening sincere parlay-ers of your website information from those with less than sincere intentions.
This is an example of a quiz and an acceptance checkbox. Nothing that hard for your site visitor, one extra step of protection for you. Most people will appreciate your efforts to prevent spam.
Quiz Those Spammers Out of Business!
Posted by: | CommentsAnother great spam fighter within the Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin is the quiz option. You can require the site visitor to answer math problems (like Google does) or tell you the color of grass. Just one more obstacle for those just-don’t-get-it spammers.
Quizzes are less of a problem for the novice webdesigner because they don’t require the server support that CAPTCHAs do. And, for some of your site visitors, they will be much easier to understand than the strange combination of numbers and letters on a CAPTCHA.
Personally, I like the combination of a quiz and an acceptance checkbox. I’ll talk about that on my next blog post.
Captivating CAPTCHAs
Posted by: | CommentsCAPTCHA, all caps, stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Hmmm, CAPTCHA is easier to remember. CAPTCHAs, plural, has a small s on the end.
Let’s just focus on what it does: helps prevent spam. A CAPTCHA can be a picture or numbers that must be typed in by the site visitor thus preventing machine spam.
CAPTCHAs are sometimes hard for site visitors to read. For the webmaster, difficulties occur if your webhost doesn’t provide a graphic library to store them.
With Contact Form 7, you, the webdesigner, can choose to use CAPTCHA when you create forms. Before you do, be sure to download the “Really Simple CAPTCHA” plugin, and then activate it.
Next, create a new form with Contact Form 7 and configure it. When you generate the CAPTCHA tag, you can choose from 3 sizes and enter color codes to customize it to your website. Here’s the one I did as an example using a black background and green text:
Very simple to do, thanks to Takayuki Miyoshi, the plugin developer.
Spammers, Contact Form 7, And You
Posted by: | CommentsThose spammers, what do they think they’re going to accomplish by bombarding us with emails? Here’s how to prevent spamming through your online forms that you’ve created with Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7 gives you three options to control spam: CAPTCHA, quizzes, Akismet, or even a combination of the three. Today, I’m going to talk about Akismet. I’ll cover the other two in the next two posts.
Akismet will prevent human spamming. It doesn’t work as well with forms as it does with blog posts, but it is worth using. Akismet will look at the name, email, and URL and make the decision: is or isn’t it spam? Once that decision is made, the site visitor is notified with one of the messages below.
So, that’s one more barrier those spammers have to crawl over to get to your inbox! To learn all about Contact Form 7, take a look here.
