DTX

Contact Form 7 is an excellent WordPress plugin and one of the top choices of free WordPress plugins for contact forms. DTX – Dynamic Text Extension for Contact Form 7 makes it even more awesome by adding dynamic content capabilities. While default values in Contact Form 7 are static, DTX lets you create pre-populated fields pulled from other locations. Some examples might include:

• Auto-filling a URL or just getting the domain name or path
• Auto-filling a post ID, title, or slug
• Auto-filling a title, URL, or slug for the current page
• Pre-populating a product number
• Referencing other content on the site
• Populating with post or page info
• Populating with the current user’s info
• Populating with custom and meta fields
• Generating unique identifiers for support tickets
• Getting a list of post categories or other custom taxonomies
• Getting a value from a cookie
• Getting custom theme modifications
• Any value using custom shortcodes

The possibilities are endless!

For over 10 years, DTX only handled <input type="text" /> and <input type="hidden" /> form fields, but version 4 finally introduces more:

• email
• URL
• tel (for phone numbers)
• number
• range (slider)
• textarea (multiline text)
• drop-down menu (select field)
• checkboxes
• radio buttons
• date
• submit (yes, a submit button where you can have dynamic text!)

What does it do?

DTX provides flexibility to WordPress users in creating dynamic forms in Contact Form 7. DTX comes with several built-in shortcodes that will allow the contact form to be populated from HTTPS GET variable or any info from the get_bloginfo() function, among others. See below for included shortcodes.

Don’t see the shortcode you need on the list? You can write a custom one! Any shortcode that returns a string or numeric value can be used here. The included shortcodes just cover the most common scenarios, but DTX provides the flexibility for you to grab any value you have access to programmatically.

Dynamic Value

The bread and butter of this plugin, set a dynamic value! This field can take any shortcode, with two important provisions:

1. The shortcode should NOT include the normal square brackets ([ and ]). So, instead of [CF7_GET key='value'] you would use CF7_GET key='value'.
2. Any parameters in the shortcode must use single quotes. That is: CF7_GET key='value' and not CF7_GET key="value"

Dynamic Placeholder

Set a dynamic placeholder with this attribute! This feature accepts static text or a shortcode. If using a shortcode, the same syntax applies from the dynamic value field. However, this field also has a few more needs:

1. The text/shortcode must first have apostrophes converted to it’s HTML entity code, '
2. After that, it must be URL encoded so that spaces become %20 and other non-alphanumeric characters are converted.

If you’re using Contact Form 7’s tag generator to create the form tag, those extra needs are already taken care of. Dynamic placeholders are not available for dynamic hidden form tags.

Learn more and see examples from the DTX Knowledge base.

Read the full description on the official page →