The WordPress plugin

The Cayve plugin connects a WordPress site to your Cayve account. It sends each comment, review, registration and form submission to Cayve, acts on the answer, and keeps held messages safe until you review them.

Requirements: WordPress 6.0 or later and PHP 7.4 or later.

Installing

Download the plugin from the site’s page in your dashboard (Download the plugin), then upload it in WordPress under Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin and activate it. Paste a live key on Cayve → Overview and press Test the connection. The getting started guide walks through it step by step.

The four screens

The plugin adds a Cayve menu to wp-admin with four screens.

Screen	What it’s for
Overview	Connection status, what’s waiting for you, and the last few decisions.
Messages	The held inbox: release, confirm or delete messages. See Held messages.
Protection	Shadow mode for this site and which integrations are on.
Settings	Your key, the typing summary, the daily email, automatic updates and proxy settings.

Settings

Setting	What it does
API key	The key from your dashboard. Paste a new one here to replace it.
Typing summary	Sends counts of key presses, pastes and pointer movement with each form, never what was typed. It helps tell people from bots.
Daily email	One email a day to the site admin, only when messages were held.
Install Cayve updates automatically	On by default. See Plugin updates.
Behind a proxy or CDN	Read the visitor’s address from Cloudflare or proxy headers. Leave it on unless your host says otherwise.

On Protection you’ll find Shadow mode on this site and a switch for each integration. Integrations switch themselves on when the plugin they protect is active.

Custom forms

A theme’s quote form or a hand-built contact form can use Cayve too. The plugin’s page script already adds Cayve’s token and hidden field to every form on the page, so your form gets the same evidence:

$result = cayve_check( array(
    'message' => $message,
    'name'    => $name,
    'email'   => $email,
    'form'    => 'Quote form', // shown in the inbox
) );
cayve_hold_mail( $result ); // call before sending notifications
wp_mail( $to, $subject, $body ); // held or blocked: kept in the Cayve inbox

if ( 'block' === $result['act'] ) {
    // optional: skip saving the entry
}

$result['act'] is what to do: allow, hold or block. It is always allow in shadow mode or when Cayve can’t be reached. You can also pass url, subject, phone, type (contact, comment, review, registration, signup, order or other) and fields, an array of other fields as label ⇒ value.

If Cayve can’t be reached

The plugin waits at most a second and a half for an answer. If there’s none, the submission goes through as normal and is checked afterwards. Your forms never break because of Cayve.

Uninstalling

Deactivate and delete the plugin from Plugins. Revoke the site’s key in the dashboard if you won’t be using it again.