This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

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Live Preview for Contact Form 7

By Addons for Contact Form 7

Description

View a live preview of your form as you’re building it.

Contact Form 7 Preview

Contact Form 7 is great, but building your forms using form tags can be painful and slow when you have to constantly save, switch tabs and refresh to see your changes.

Contact Form 7 Live Preview relieves this pain by displaying a live preview of your form directly underneath the form editor.

How does it work

Contact Form 7 Live Preview creates a “dummy” form and displays it in the live preview pane. Whenever you make changes to a form you’re working on, it saves your current state to the dummy form and refreshes the preview. This means you don’t have to save your form to see your changes, which can be especially important if your form is currently live.

The dummy form is set to demo_mode: on, which means you can test the validation and success messages and no emails will be sent.

Note: It may not work with some themes or plugins

The preview window displays just the form. It loads your site’s scripts and styles as long as they’re enqueued properly via hooks. If something isn’t looking right in the preview, make sure your scripts and styles are enqueued correctly, and aren’t loaded conditionally (E.g. is_page('contact')).

If it doesn’t work for you, please don’t go straight for leaving a bad review. Let me know in the forums and we’ll figure out if the problem is with the plugin, or with your theme. If it’s a problem with the plugin I’ll try and fix it.

Features:

  • Live preview changes to your form
  • Test validation and error messages without sending emails
  • Set the background colour of the preview (helpful if your form is going to be on a different coloured background once live)
  • Works with most CF7 addons that affect the look and behaviour of your form

Tested with:

Screenshots

  • Live preview window directly beneath form editor.
  • Works with your site's other scripts and styles.
  • Even check your form's validation and success messages!

Installation

  1. Upload the zip to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory and unzip
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

OR go to ‘Plugins’ > ‘Add new’, and search for ‘contact form 7 live preview’ to install through the WordPress dashboard.

Reviews

Works on some sites, but not others. Is it still Maintained?

January 29, 2021
Update/edit: It works great on some websites, but not at all on other websites. Even though this is for the backend only, it may be the theme that causes it to not work on some sites. It also might be a plugin, though most of the plugins I have are on both a site where preview works, and on a site where it does not work. Honestly, preview should be part of CF7 itself! It is great when it works. Especially when developing a form that you do not want to include on your site yet, and do not want to create a dummy page just to display it. Prev: No longer working. Now it just shows a blank background, where it used to show a preview. It has not been updated in quite some time. Perhaps it is not compatible with latest WP versions? It look like it may no longer be maintained? 🙁 CF7 itself should include a native previewer!

Nice!

October 10, 2019
Simple and easy to see just below the code window

Nice

March 30, 2019
Its not that you get to see live preview but after saving the form. Nice though.
Read all 11 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Live Preview for Contact Form 7” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Translate “Live Preview for Contact Form 7” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

1.2.0

  • Fixed a security issue allowing logged in users without the correct privileges to update the hidden contact form.

1.1.0

  • Fixed autoreloading
  • Fixed the JavaScript alert asking if you want to save before leaving
  • Added a width slider

1.0.1

  • Updates to comply with the “Contact Form 7” trademark policy

1.0.0

  • Plugin has been stable long enough to be given 1.0.0 tag

0.1.4

  • Fix a bug that displayed admin bar on front end

0.1.3

  • Fix a deactivation bug

0.1.2

  • Fix a plugin activation bug

0.1.1

  • Add support and rating links to sidebar

0.1.0

  • First release – beta

Meta

Ratings

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Support

Issues resolved in last two months:

0 out of 1

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