As a WordPress expert (and that’s not a self proclaimed title, at least one other person has referenced me as such!), of course I have a list of WordPress plugins I put on just about every WordPress website I make. If that site needs contact forms on a budget, then my go-to is Contact Form 7 (CF7).
Contact Form 7 is free and incredibly developer friendly in my professional opinion. It might not have all the bells and whistles that Gravity Forms has, but it is simple and meets the primary need while allowing the developer community do it’s thing by creating addons to extend it’s functionality.
Contact Form 7 – Dynamic Text Extension (DTX) is one such utility plugin I rely on. As the name suggests, it extends CF7 by adding dynamic form fields. Instead of a boring and blank static “first name” field, DTX can dynamically pre-populate that field with your first name if you’re logged in.
However, like the other 100,000+ users of Contact Form 7 – Dynamic Text Extension, I started getting notifications in my automatic reports that DTX was abandoned (i.e., not updated in the last three years). I took to the support forums asking questions like a few others.
With no response from the developer author, I started looking up the process on how to adopt an abandoned WordPress plugin. I needed this plugin to exist and if it truly was abandoned, then I’d be happy to take it on.
I meticulously followed the steps laid out by WordPress, checked and double checked and triple checked that I hadn’t missed anything. After all, I just wanted the plugin to get updated, it didn’t matter if it was mine or not.
After 3.5 months of emails back and forth with the WordPress plugins team, the adoption was approved and the plugin was temporarily closed for the transfer. I uploaded version 3.0.0 of the plugin, my first version, to the repository within an hour of receiving the email and within 24 hours, the plugin was reopened.
One of the biggest differences users will notice is that I finally gave the plugin an image. The logo for Contact Form 7 is the beautiful Mt. Fuji designed by artist, designer, and developer, Cheung Vong, based on Hokusai’s old print art that was used as a temporary logo for many years. It’s a blue mountain with a white snowpeak on a light blue background.
For Contact Form 7 – Dynamic Text Extension, I made a purple mountain with a white snowpeak on an animated sunrise behind it. I figured, if this plugin is about making CF7 dynamic, then our image should be dynamic too. I have plans on cleaning it up because I don’t like how blocky the mountain looks, but I was rushed. Nobody was actually rushing me, my anxiety was rushing me.
The updates in version 3.0.0 also included two (2) features that were reported in the plugin’s support forums. I thought after cleaning up and modernizing the code, I should start working on those requests and bug reports.
All-in-all, I’m excited to have adopted Contact Form 7 – Dynamic Text Extension and might even consider making more original CF7 addons.
Related Links
- Contact Form 7 – Dynamic Text Extension Product Page
- Contact Form 7 – Dynamic Text Extension Knowledge Base
- Contact Form 7 – Dynamic Text Extension on WordPress.org
- Contact Form 7 – Dynamic Text Extension on GitHub
April 15, 2023, Update: I’ve been in touch with Chris Mavricos of SevenSpark and we decided to be co-authors of the plugin! My commit access to the plugin on the WordPress repo has been restored. Huzzah! Users will also notice that the icon and banner were updated by Chris, which I’m totally cool with. My particular icon wasn’t that great anyway!
February 4, 2023, Update: In the interest of transparency, I wanted to let you all know that I currently do not have commit access which means I cannot make updates or fixes to Contact Form 7 – Dynamic Text Extension (DTX) at this time.
Adopting abandoned plugins can be a bit of a complicated process. The entire procedure can be viewed here in the WordPress dev resources. In the email I received from the plugins team on December 15, 2022, they wrote:
We also wish to warn you that there remains a possibility that the current owner may approve the adoption and change their mind. Should they do so, we will attempt to find a solution that is acceptable to all parties, but it is possible we would have to rescind our approval. We hope this won’t happen, it’s only happened twice, but we want you to be aware.
This is officially the third time in WordPress plugin history where a completed adoption of a WordPress plugin was reversed, so DTX is currently in a limbo state until we can sort this out.
However, please feel free to continue using the DTX support forum and I’ll do my best to help with support requests and answering questions. Thank you!
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on , and was last reviewed on . Added the announcement at the bottom of the article regarding the update in ownership.
Congratulation on the approve, I use this plugin as well on many projects and after reading the update notes, I wanted to check what it’s all about, don’t want a freemium plugin over night like many others.
Appreciate the transparency and backstory into this!