WordPress Form bugs (cforms, Contact Form 7)

I posted, awhile back, on the WordPress forums, that I was having some trouble with Cforms, Contact Form 7 and WordPress other forms plugins. I’ve had two people contact me asking how I resolved the problems. Here’s what I said in the most recent reply (slightly expanded):

It was quite an adventure. I abandoned plugins for awhile, creating the forms from scratch (custom WP template, with standard PHP/MySQL form processing) which was a pain, then I found this: Gravity Forms.

It cost a little money, but it’s really great, and the cost is more than made up for the time saved and the slick functionality.

I’m planning to get a developers license and use it on all my sites.

The problem turned out to be a combination of things:
a) The client chose a Windows server, which couldn’t use the PHP mail() function. This can be resolved with a plugin that does SMTP.
b) GoDaddy requires that the email account of any outgoing mail from their servers be a GoDaddy email account (hosted on their mailservers). We set up an “info@domain.com” address and used it as ‘from’ address.
c) There was a conflict with some jQuery that caused the little “sending” animation to hang the browser. I never sorted this one out.

Eventually I got the client to move the account (I donated my time) onto A2hosting which sped up the site quite a bit, and got me a standard CPanel hosting interface, and avoids all the mega-annoying GoDaddy advertising. Now it’s all rosy.

At this point I’ve used Gravity Forms for only one site, but I liked it a lot, and have had no problems with it. However, I used it on a Linux server on A2hosting.com, not GoDaddy.

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