Can be tricky to implement

Good day @sejohnsen1

I want to try and help where possible, or at least provide some clarity around some of your valid complaints.

First up regarding styling, we strive to let the forms inherit from the users’ active themes as much as possible and where possible. We don’t try to force our own style choices on them. At the same time, we also do not have various UI options available for easy detail choices. We acknowledge that this is currently in contrast to other plugins that have been available for many more years. We do provide many IDs and classes that can be used to target the forms that the Constant Contact Forms plugin generates, for custom styling as necessary.

The documentation around the opt-in details is more right than I personally have been with my support in the past. I was mistaken previously regarding that field’s necessity, and have learned more about the underlaying functionality since. My apologies there.

It should not be a necessary field to have. The form should be going through the process to have the submission sent to the connected Constant Contact list. We are working to improve information about this detail and clarify better.

Regarding the success message, the forms are not JUST sending some data to a connected ConstantContact account. Technically, you do not even need an account to use the plugin. At minimum and out of the box, it should be sending an email with the collected form data. The success message is less about if the contact reached a Constant Contact-connected list, and more that the form found no issues with processing the initial submission.

By default the API requests are queued up and held on a 1 minute delay in conjunction with WordPress’ cron system. That said, because of previous support requests, we made the decision to offer a way to override that cron process, and allow sending the API requests right away. You can find the setting in our settings area. It’s also possible that for some reason, the API request did not return its own success reply, and something was not set up right for it. If that is the case, then we would need to dig a bit deeper in to see what is going on, and how we can help resolve the issue. If it comes down to an issue that is preventable somehow, we can roll fixes in that benefit everyone in a future release.

Let us know if you have any questions, thoughts, concerns that you’d like to discuss. We’re happy to answer as best we can, as well as take suggestions/recommendations to help make the plugin better.

Michael,
Thank you for your detailed response. I do see how CSS could be used for some styling. 2 suggestions: 1) A very basic styling option would be to allow a placeholder instead of a separate text label, and/or to hide field labels. 2) Since the plugin places form fields inside a <p> tag, the theme’s CSS for form fields is being overridden by paragraph styles, and after 2 hours of wrestling with it I was unable to make it work right.

Thank you for clarifying that I don’t need another checkbox in addition to the opt in form. However, some clarity and/or transparency in the UI would be very helpful. As a long-time Constant Contact customer, the first thing I did was connect my Constant Contact account and select what list the contacts would go into. At no point did the UI state that they would not actually be submitted via API to the account. I might also suggest 2 different success messages, or a report in the admin panel of what was submitted in the form vs what was sent to Constant Contact. A false success message is much more frustrating than an outright error message.

The problem seems to be that the cron never runs. I followed your suggestion and disabled the one minute delay, and the user was finally added!

Noted on all parts, and we’ll take in the feedback and do what we can to help.

Cron is always a tricky thing to deal with, and it’s possibly that some other part of the site not working quite right in that area, can jam up the whole process for everyone else.

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions ??

Another issue with the plugin is that the background of the email field changes to white when an email is fully or partially validated. As a consequence, it does not work with themes that use white text on a dark background for forms.

@dpwebmaster if you have a working example of that situation, we’d appreciate a link to it so we can see what we can do regarding it. I’ve personally tried to recreate the situation myself but I feel there are more variables/corners needing accounted for to replicate like you describe.

For example, I’ve set a div holding the form to background to black, the input fields to text color of white, and the input background colors to transparent. Not getting white on white with an invalid email provided in the input.