Category Archives: Technology

Blogposts on blog.futtta.be about internet, web developement, browsers, security, linux, …

Contact Form 7 alternatives

5 Replies

Contact Form 7: trouble right here in volcano city!Given the major change in Contact Form 7‘s frontend JavaScript and the problems having to optimize the JS or cache the page after the update, the question I get asked frequently is what alternatives there are to CF7.

So here is a very quick rundown of 3 such alternatives:

  1. Gravity Forms: premium-only, visual form builder, very flexible, big ecosystem (lots of 3rd party plugins & integrations)
  2. Formidable Forms: has a free Light version, drag & drop interface for building forms, very flexible (we currently use this on autoptimize.com), lots of integrations but smaller ecosystem.
  3. HTML Forms: free plugin from the team that also develops “Koko Analytics” (which I now use on all my sites) and “Mailchimp for WordPress” with a premium addon for extra features, similar to Contact Form 7, no frills, very light on JS so great for performance.

My advice; try HTML Forms if you have rather standard contactform-like forms and you’re not looking for something fancy (which CF7 is not either), try Formidable if you need drag & drop form building or if you (will) need more flexibility/ integrations.

Contact Form 7 update breaks Autoptimize JS optimization: workaround

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Due to a recent major change in Contact Form 7’s frontend JavaScript Autoptimize users might have to add wp-includes/js/dist the comma-separated JS optimization exclusion list (or in some cases even wp-includes/js).

It is nice CF7 gets rid of the jQuery dependancy, but I’m not sure is replacing that with a significant amount of extra WordPress blocks JS-files was such a good idea?

Update: additionally the change also introduces nonces (random password-like strings as hidden elements in the form) which can spell serious trouble when using page caching plugins.

Autoptimize Image Optimization to be less “lazy” with pictures

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Up until now Autoptimize, when performing image optimization, relies on JS-based lazyloading (with the great lazysizes component) to differentiate between browser that support different image formats (AVIF, WebP and JPEG as fallback).

As JS-based Lazyload is going out of fashion though (with native lazyload being supported by more browsers and WordPress having out-of-the-box support for it too), it is time to start working on output in Autoptimize to serve “nextgen image formats” where different tags offer the AVIF and WebP files and the tag (which includes the  loading=”lazy” attribute) with JPEG as fallback.

For now that functionality is in a separate “power-up”, available on Github. If you have Image Optimization active in Autoptimize (and you are on the Beta version, Autoptimize 2.8.1 is missing a filter which the power-up needs so download & install the Beta if not done yet), you can download the plugin Github and give it a go. All feedback is welcome!

Fix for Elementor 3.1 YouTube not LYTE anymore

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Elementor 3.1 came with “refactored YouTube source to use YouTube API in Video widget” which resulted in WP YouTube Lyte not being able to lyten up the YouTubes any more. Below code snippet (consider it beta) hooks into Elementor to fix this regression;

add_filter( 'elementor/frontend/widget/should_render', function( $should_render, $elementor_element ) {
	if ( function_exists( 'lyte_preparse' ) && 'Elementor\Widget_Video' === get_class( $elementor_element ) ) {
		$pas = get_private_property( $elementor_element , 'parsed_active_settings');
		if ( ! empty( $pas['youtube_url'] ) ) {
			echo lyte_preparse( $pas['youtube_url'] );
			return false;
		}
	}

	return $should_render;
}, 10, 2 );

// from https://www.lambda-out-loud.com/posts/accessing-private-properties-php/
function get_private_property( object $object, string $property ) {
    $array = (array) $object;
    $propertyLength = strlen( $property );
    foreach ( $array as $key => $value ) {
        if ( substr( $key, -$propertyLength ) === $property ) {
            return $value;
        }
    }
}

Hat tip to Koen for his assistance in digging into Elementor, much appreciated!

AO image optimization: transparent .png to avif issue

1 Reply

if “Load WebP or AVIF in supported browsers?” is on, .png files with transparency will loose that transparency in browsers that support AVIF due to a recent technical change in Shortpixel’s AVIF toolchain.

Shortpixel is looking at alternative solutions, but until then as a workaround you can either:

  • add .png to Autoptimize’s lazyload exclusion field
  • or to use below code snippet to disable AVIF images;

add_filter( 'autoptimize_filter_imgopt_do_avif', '__return_false');