CF7 hook for sending data to Amazon SQS

A simple PHP hook for getting data from Contact Form 7 (CF7) and send it to Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Description

Amazon SQS is a queue service where you can send messages to. In this use case, we want to get the data entered by users on a CF7 form - a popular WordPress plugin - and send that data to the SQS. The code in this repo is basically a WordPress custom plugin that has to be uploaded in a dedicated folder like /wp-content/plugins/cf7-amazon-sqs.

Requirements

In order to use this code you need:

• an active WordPress installation
• PHP version >=5.5.0
• PHP with SimpleXML extension enabled
• CF7 plugin
• Composer

Installation

• Create a dedicated plugin folder (e.g. cf7-amazon-sqs) containing the PHP source file inside /wp-content/plugins/ folder
• Install the Amazon SDK as a dependency using Composer inside the plugin folder: composer require aws/aws-sdk-php
• Activate the plugin through the your-site/wp-admin/plugins.php page

Configurations

• The function add_custom_field is optional and can be used to assign a unique ID to the form submission.
• In function cf7_amazon_sqs there's a check about the form title. The hook will send data to the Amazon SQS only if the title contains a TitleCustomString (change this string with your desired value).
• In function cf7_amazon_sqs you can customize the posted data you are getting from CF7. Remember that the fields name (e.g. surname) have to be same in the CF7 dashboard.
• In function cf7_amazon_sqs there's the $client variable that holds all the client details:
  • Change the region parameter with your curernt Amazon SQS region.
  • Consider a better authentication with environment variables than the hardcoded (but faster for development) solution you can see in credentials parameter.
• In function cf7_amazon_sqs there's the $params variable that holds useful parameters like:
  • MessageAttributes - you can choose to use this parameter to send data to the Amazon SQS.
  • MessageBody - you can choose to use this parameter in addition (or as an alternative) to MessageAttributes to send data do the Amazon SQS.
  • QueueUrl - is the parameter that holds your Amazon SQS url (change it by replacing the example value yourAmazonSQSURL at the beginning of the cf7_amazon_sqs function).

Troubleshooting

• To check if you are having some errors, activate WordPress debug mode and log in /wp-config.php adding the following lines of code:

   define('WP_DEBUG', true);
   define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);
  

  These 2 commands will write a debug.log inside the /wp-content folder anytime WordPress will face same warnings/errors.
• Common issues that you could encounter:
  • Problem: you have freshly installed the SimpleXML extension for PHP, but you still get an error about missing extension in WordPress. Solution: try to restart the server (e.g. sudo systemctl restart apache2).
  • Problem: Composer is not globally installed. Solution: follow these commands if you are using Ubuntu 20.04 as server or refer to Composer's official documentation.
  • Problem: after installing Amazon SDK dependencies for PHP, WordPress cannot access the /vendor subfolder or related files, so permissions are messed up. Solution: go inside the plugin folder and change the permissions using chown with your WordPress instance couple user:group (generally it's www-data:www-data or apache:apache) running the command sudo chown -R yourWPInstanceUser:yourWPInstanceUserGroup *.
  • Problem: conflicts with other plugins' Composer dependencies. Solution: try to update/disable other plugins. Generally they use older versions of dependencies.