Requires PHP 8.3 when site is running on PHP 8.4 or 8.5. Totally broken

Edit: Appears to be a network site issue – main site works fine, but detection fails on child sites.

I have used Contact Form 7 for years for being lightweight, dependable, and unlikely to cause problems. That simplicity, combined with millions of active installations, is precisely why so many of us trusted it on our websites, and, indirectly, our livelihoods.

Which makes this situation absolutely infuriating.

After a long period that felt like near-abandonment, we are suddenly confronted with a major PHP requirement jump to 8.3, and reports are emerging of sites being broken by the transition. The latest release raises the minimum PHP requirement from the 7.4 supported by the 6.1 series to 8.3 in version 6.2. That is not a trivial housekeeping change for a plugin installed across more than 10 million WordPress sites.

A plugin this widely used has a responsibility to take backward compatibility and upgrade safety seriously. Not every website runs on a custom development environment with a staging server, a developer on standby, and the luxury of testing every update before it reaches production. Many of us work on shared hosting like GoDaddy. Some manage large, established websites with complicated combinations of themes, plugins, custom code, and hosting restrictions. We cannot simply snap our fingers and create a perfect staging environment every time a plugin decides to make a major compatibility change. You’re supposed to be LIGHTWEIGHT AND UNPROBLEMATIC.

And when a routine plugin update results in a white screen of death or a critical error, the consequences are not theoretical. You have caused businesses to lose money and people to lose sleep. Contact forms can stop working. Developers and site administrators lose hours diagnosing compatibility problems and recovering a site that was working JUST FINE before the update.

There is another issue that makes this considerably worse: reports from users that support threads discussing broken sites have disappeared. I cannot speak to the reason individual threads were removed, but removing discussions without clear explanations, public acknowledgment, and visible guidance leaves users feeling silenced rather than supported. It makes you look corrupt. If a widespread problem is being reported, the appropriate response is transparent communication, clear troubleshooting instructions, and a practical path to recovery, not leaving developers to piece together what happened from scattered complaints. You are clearly demonstrating contempt for the very community that allowed your plugin to become popular, and you also took away the very reasons your plugin was popular at all.

Backwards compatibility is not an optional courtesy when your plugin is actively installed on over 10 million websites. It is part of responsible maintenance. If a major PHP requirement change is necessary, communicate it clearly, provide a sensible transition, make compatibility checks reliable, and ensure users have a safe way to recover. A plugin should fail gracefully when its requirements are not met, not break sites.

I have never felt compelled to leave a negative review for ANY plugin before in all these years. That is what makes this particularly disappointing. I recommended this plugin because it was simple, lightweight, and dependable. I cannot confidently make that recommendation now. I am recommending everyone I know drop it immediately and walk away because your actions suggest you do not care about the community whatsoever or the stability of our sites.

For those seeking a lightweight, easy, UNPROBLEMATIC PLUGIN, -this is NO LONGER IT. Replace it with an alternative rather than risk further disruption.

I encourage other affected users to leave honest, detailed reviews explaining what happened to their sites. The community deserves transparency and software updates that do not turn routine maintenance into a five-alarm fire situation and then be hidden.

An update broke 5 of our clients sites (without even downloading the update). Support threads mentioning this issue are deleted and the author always asks to “see the site where this is happening” when it is a widespread easily repeatable problem which many have. Most decent webmasters will have deleted the plugin to ensure the site works rather than wait for a plugin author to fix it. I presume the problem relates to “cpanel softaculous” wordpress installations (although all plugins are selected and installed through the wordpress interface on our sites) and those that use composer dependencies are at fault. I’ve never left a bad review but when support threads are deleted, there is no acknowledgment of the problem, roll back or fix I have no option but to warn others that this plug in support is currently substandard. Over the long history of using this plugin it has been great and offers many options, we loved using it but breaking a site instead of degrading gracefully is a serious problem.

🇷🇺 Русская версия

Contact Form 7 6.2 — кто решил, что удаление шорткодов — это улучшение?

Кто додумался убрать отображение шорткодов из списка контактных форм?

Вы вообще понимаете, насколько неудобным сделали процесс работы для веб-разработчиков?

Годами всё работало нормально. Можно было открыть список форм, скопировать шорткод и вставить его куда нужно. Быстро, просто и удобно.

Теперь ради чего вы это убрали? Чтобы заставить всех пользоваться Gutenberg?

Не все создают сайты из готовых блоков. Многие работают с собственным HTML, PHP и кастомными шаблонами WordPress.

Вы взяли нормально работающую функцию и просто убрали её, создав проблему на ровном месте.

Это не улучшение интерфейса, а ухудшение функциональности.

Кто просил вас удалять отображение шорткодов? Кому они мешали?

Верните отображение шорткодов в список контактных форм! Если вам так хочется продвигать Gutenberg, делайте это, не мешая тем, кто использует другие способы разработки.🇬🇧 English version

Contact Form 7 6.2 — Who decided that removing shortcode visibility was an improvement?

Who thought removing shortcodes from the contact form list was a good idea?

Do you even understand how inconvenient you've made the workflow for web developers?

Everything worked perfectly fine for years. You could open the form list, copy a shortcode, and paste it wherever you needed. Fast, simple, and convenient.

Why did you remove this functionality? To force everyone to use Gutenberg?

Not everyone builds websites using ready-made blocks. Many developers work with custom HTML, PHP, and their own WordPress templates.

You took a perfectly functional feature and simply removed it, creating a problem where none existed.

This is not a user interface improvement. It's a step backward in functionality.

Who asked you to remove shortcode visibility? Who was it bothering?

Bring back the shortcode column in the contact form list! If you want to promote Gutenberg, that's your choice, but stop making life harder for developers who use other workflows.

The latest auto-update of your plugin broke my website because the new version suddenly requires PHP 8.3, while my site was running on PHP 8.0. An automatic update should not take a working website offline because of a major compatibility requirement like this. This was extremely frustrating and completely unacceptable!

I used CF7 for many many years and thank you for this But without a reason all forms stopped working. SMTP test email was ok, but no form was sending. Trying to remove captcha and make a form as simple but without success. I switched to another plugin and it’s working normal. I rate it with 3 stars for all these years together !

This is the best easy to use plugin for any kind of form set up. I have use CF7 Plugin on each and every clients sites.

Since the beginning of my career, Contact Form 7 has been one of the plugins I’ve used the most. Over the years, I’ve worked on many different websites, and it has consistently been a reliable solution for creating contact forms. What I appreciate most is its simplicity—it does the job without unnecessary complexity.

Even today, with so many alternatives available, I still find Contact Form 7 useful for projects that need a straightforward and dependable contact form. It’s flexible enough to be customized when needed and has remained a valuable tool in my WordPress development workflow for years.

Still one of those plugins I install on almost every site. It’s simple, doesn’t try to do too much, and just works. Not the prettiest interface, but once it’s set up I never really have to think about it again.

I have known this plugin since I first started with WordPress and have used it for a long time. It is the simplest but most useful form plugin. Does exactly what it should, no extra clutter. Thanks to Takayuki Miyoshi.