Just a really quick post to say that I’ve wasted about a day trying to get these two plugins to work together and just can’t do it.
An epiphany last night: just create a separate WP install with a very simple theme that shows a holding page with a contact form, then switch between the sites using Apache in order to achieve the maintenance page effect. Simple! Obviously this will only work if you:
- Have the ability to host more than one WP install at the same IP address
- Can play with Apache’s vhosts.conf (or equivalent) to switch between sites
- Have a ‘spare’ URL pointing at the site which you can use whilst its in maintenance mode (and can swap the Home and SiteURL fields over in PHPMyAdmin)
I use a great little VPS so can achieve this. It’s definitely not as much fun as just using WP Maintenance Mode, but it’s definitely more fun than sweating over how to get it working with Contact Form 7!
So, if you’re trying to get WP Maintenance Mode and Contact Form 7 to play nicely together – I wish you luck and if you achieve it, I’d love to learn how 🙂