How To Fix Contact Form 7 v5.01 - Reverting Back To reCaptcha v2

As of the time of writing, v5.01 is broken. There are hundreds of 1-star reviews which have been piling up over the last few days.

It's not clear if the plugin itself is at fault or if the v3 of reCaptcha is just not filtering out the spam as effectively (maybe it's having to retrain its model for each new site, I'm not sure).

Either way, CF7 only supports v3 of the API at the moment.

I'm sure it will be fixed soon but in the meantime, you can solve it be using an extra plugin.

It's called Invisible reCaptcha for WordPress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/invisible-recaptcha/

Step By Step Guide

Go to Admin > Contact Form 7 >  Integrations and remove the API keys you have set up:

Then go to Plugins > Add Plugin and search for "Invisible reCaptcha for WordPress" by Mihai Chelaru.

Install it and activate it.

Open a new tab and go to your reCaptcha admin account: https://www.google.com/recaptcha/admin

Generate new keys with the setting reCAPTCHA v2 > Invisible

When you have filled out the form you will get some keys like you have used before:

Copy the Site Key into your clipboard.

Now go back to WordPress and go to Admin > Settings > Invisible reCaptcha

Paste the Site Key into the Site Key field, then go back and copy the Secret Key into the Secret Key.

Bonus: You can set the badge position - I prefer to make it the bottom left, or inline rather than its default right, that is often used up by a "back to top" element of the theme.

Click Save Changes.

IMPORTANT: There is one last step, it won't automatically work with Contact Form 7 forms.

Go to the Contact Forms tab, enabled it for Contact Form 7, and click Save Changes again on that tab:

OK your site is now safely protected again!

Hopefully, this will be fixed in the next few days.

PRO TIP: Don't forget to flush any cache plugins your site might be using.

I’ve turned 10

Today marks the official day that I have been a professional web developer for 10 years!

That's a lot of buttons pushed, a lot of mice clicked and a lot of clients charmed. That's a lifetime in dog years. Its several lifetimes in internet years.

It got me thinking about how much has changed in the industry over these years. The industry moves forward so fast that I’m always caught up with what new technology I should be learning, not what technologies have faded away.

Skype won’t send any pictures I try to send

If you can’t get Skype to send pictures and keep seeing an error saying “this photo is unavailable” then hopefully this quick tip will get you back up and running with exchanging media.

Orchard CMS Quick Tip–No constructors found by AutofacUtil ConstructorFinderWrapper

While writing an Orchard CMS driver class for a tutorial recently I found myself confronted with this error message. If this has happened to you then your gut instinct might be that you are going to have to learn something about Autofac and it might get complicated. Read on for a quick solution.

Orchard CMS Quick Tip–If you cast it they will come, or Accessing your field of dreams

I see a lot of people coming up against issues trying to get at the fields they have added on their content types. If you can’t figure out how to access the data then read on to discover the important points you need to understand which will make accessing fields easy.

Orchard CMS Quick Tip–Zoned out, or Why changing Placement.info still doesn’t move your module

This is a common problem that can catch out Orchard users and developers but after you learn this easy to remember tip you should be able to solve it quickly whenever you experience in the future.

Orchard CMS Quick Tip–No Persister for: SomePartRecord

If you’re making a module with a record class and you start seeing errors saying that there is no persister for the part record class you’re working on then you have probably made this simple mistake.

Orchard CMS Quick Tip–A duplicate value cannot be inserted into a unique index

Work on an Orchard CMS widget had been going pretty well. It display OK and didn’t seem like it had any problems but each time I tried to save anything I’d get an exception thrown.