Contact Form 7 is a well-known WordPress plugin used for creating and handling contact forms on your website with ease. It offers a user-friendly interface and a variety of options to personalize your forms. One frequently asked for feature is the ability to include CC (carbon copy) recipients in your contact form submissions. In this piece, I will walk you through the steps of adding CC in Contact Form 7, drawing from my own personal experience.
Why Add CC in Contact Form 7?
Before we dive into the technical details, let’s understand why you might want to include CC recipients in your contact form submissions. Adding CC allows you to send a copy of the form submission to additional email addresses, providing transparency to your clients or team members. This can be useful, for example, if you want to keep your project manager or supervisor in the loop about the communication happening through your contact form.
Step 1: Install and Activate Contact Form 7
To begin, make sure you have Contact Form 7 installed and activated on your WordPress site. If you haven’t done so already, you can find and install the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory by navigating to “Plugins” -> “Add New” in your WordPress dashboard. Search for “Contact Form 7” and click on the “Install Now” button next to the Contact Form 7 plugin. Once installed, click on the “Activate” button to activate the plugin.
Step 2: Create a Contact Form
After activating Contact Form 7, you need to create a contact form or edit an existing one. Head over to “Contact” -> “Contact Forms” in your WordPress dashboard and click on the form you want to add CC recipients to. If you don’t have a form yet, you can create one by clicking on the “Add New” button.
Within the form editor, you can use various form elements provided by Contact Form 7, such as text fields, checkboxes, dropdowns, etc. To add a CC field, you need to use the “Additional Headers” section. This section allows you to add custom headers to the email sent with the form submission.
Step 3: Add CC Field
In the “Additional Headers” section, you can add a custom header using the following format:
Cc: [your-email]
Replace [your-email] with the email address or emails you want to CC. You can add multiple email addresses separated by commas. For example:
Cc: [email protected], [email protected]
You can also use dynamic values from your form fields in the CC header. For example, if you have a field named “client-email” in your form, you can use:
Cc: [client-email]
This will dynamically add the value entered in the “client-email” field as a CC recipient.
Step 4: Customize and Save
Once you have added the CC field to your form, you can customize the rest of the form as per your requirements. You can add additional fields, set validation rules, customize the email template, and more.
After making all the desired changes, click on the “Save” button to save your contact form.
Conclusion
Adding CC recipients in Contact Form 7 is a straightforward process that allows you to send copies of your form submissions to additional email addresses. By following the steps outlined in this article, you can easily customize your contact forms to include CC recipients, providing better communication and transparency in your organization or projects.