Installing a comment form on the blog

• 22 October 2008

So I have a few articles that people seem to like on here and I block comments after 21 days because of spam. Not a good mix. A good solution is to add a contact form of some sort to the blog. In comes Contact Form 7.

Installing the plugin is easy, just unpack it in the wp-content/plugins directory. The base form works right out of the box (once you hit Manage->Contact Form 7). Unfortunately, I get spam and I want to make sure my comment form does not generate more for me. This is where the additional configuration comes in. Here is what I had to do:

• There needs to be a writable directory at wp-content/uploads/wpcf7_captcha. It needs to be writable by the web server.
• There needs to be a few packages installed. The ones I found were gd, php-gd, and freetype.
• Once those were installed I was still getting an error like: "PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function imagetypes()" in my error log. I needed to restart my web server to pick up the new GD libraries.
• Add a few lines to the Contact Form 7 template that are for CAPTCHA. That is pretty easy to do from the manage window and the drop down element selector.

Then all I did was create a new page (rather than a post) and entered the needed markup. My "Contact" tab now has a contact form, sweet. A nice addition for 10 minutes "work".

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