Bootstrap for Contact Form 7

Bootstrap for Contact Form 7 modifies all the output of the popular Contact Form 7 plugin to be fully compatible with the current version 3 of the popular CSS framework Bootstrap. What this means to you as a Bootstrap user: No additional CSS rules necessary – from now on, Contact Form 7 integrates seamlessly with the overall Bootstrap design. It is even possible to use different form layouts via Contact Form 7’s “Additional Settings” tab.

This plugin is an addon to Contact Form 7.
The plugin requires Contact Form 7 to be activated, otherwise it won’t change anything. Furthermore you should be using it in conjunction with a Bootstrap-based WordPress theme, otherwise the forms might look weird (and there would be no point in using this addon anyway).

Usage

Bootstrap for Contact Form 7 does not provide additional options itself, so you can continue using Contact Form 7 (almost) the same way you did before.

The plugin will not break your form’s appearance, however it is recommended to adjust the contact form shortcodes to achieve perfect results: Generally, you should not be using HTML tags any longer to wrap the field shortcodes. They already include the complete Bootstrap-ready markup, including displaying labels. Read the Setup Guide for a quick introduction.

Advanced Features

The plugin brings some additional useful features to enhance your forms even more:

• the form layout can be changed to a horizontal or inline one
• the form’s input size can be globally changed
• checkbox and radio groups can be displayed either one per line, inline or as Bootstrap buttons
• text inputs and textareas support Bootstrap’s input group feature to add content before or after them
• text inputs and textareas can show a character count (the [count] shortcode from Contact Form 7) inline
• the captcha input field can show the captcha image inline
• by using GET parameters in a URL to a contact form, field values can be predefined

The above features are explained in detail on the Other Notes page.

Basic Idea behind the Plugin

Lots of WordPress Themes are based on Bootstrap – and while it is the general approach to use CSS rules to style your HTML content, it is also possible the other way around – with many benefits.

When using a well-known framework which provides general styles for all the important components of a website, it can be time-consuming to apply the same styles to third-party plugins which (obviously) have not been written with a framework in mind. This is perfectly fine, but if you’re using Bootstrap for your WordPress theme, you will certainly love the fact that you do not need to write CSS rules for the Contact Form 7 plugin any longer. It will all look like Bootstrap from the beginning so that it fits into your website design. If you’re not using Bootstrap, this plugin is useless for you – but maybe you’re just having an idea how you can adjust another popular WordPress plugin to integrate with another well-written CSS framework.

Advanced Features

Additional Settings

Here you find additional settings which are part of the Bootstrap for Contact Form 7 plugin. If you want to learn more about the additional settings of the original Contact Form 7 plugin, please visit this page.

You can adjust several form properties (properties that affect an entire form, not just a single field of it) to give your forms the appearance you want. Here is a list of the properties, what they do and their possible values:

Read the full description on the official page →