The Problem
The submit button on my new Contact form was visible in the builder platform, but it was invisible on the live site built with the free Sydney theme. The basic WPForms and Sydney videos and user guides offered no hints about how to fix it. I felt like I was poking scattered pinpricks inside a black box, unable to punch a hole big enough to illuminate a solution.
The Choice
I had a choice. I could pore through the internet for related Q&A threads, dive into more detailed documentation, get professional support by buying WPForms and Sydney Pro, or use artificial intelligence (AI).
I chose AI. After opening the AI Copilot chat panel next to my builder platform and asking for help, I expected immediate illumination, revealing a root cause and resolution on a silver platter. Presto. No fuss, no muss. Instead, I spent many hours daily on a three-day trek through a shrouded maze.
Hercules
Day one: according to my resolute companion, whom I named Hercules, the Submit button was invisible because the Sydney theme hijacked it. In Hercules speak, it is injecting the form fields automatically but not injecting a submit button.
Hercules provided a lengthy technical explanation and three potential fixes. None worked. Hours of back-and-forth ensued without resolution. I felt like Sisyphus, rolling a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down. Hercules, cool as a cucumber, politely fed me techno-babble, rehashing the same fixes and confidently assuring me the next one would work. But it didn’t.
Day two: still stuck in the maze with Hercules. Around and around, we go; where we stop, nobody knows. My fellow wanderer kept assuring me we were close. Indomitably, it soldiered on. I tired.
Odysseus
Day three: a fresh start after a good night’s sleep. I opened a new chat, assuming it knew nothing of Hercules’s travails. I called it Odysseus. It also pegged Sydney as the culprit, happily guiding me through previous and new esoteric solutions to the maze, such as:
- Disable the preloader;
- Add Elementor plugin;
- Reconfigure Sydney template;
- Override functions.php file code;
- Remove Sydney contact widgets;
- Deactivate all plugins and reactivate them one by one.
Other weird and wonderful diversions followed, all leading to dead ends. I was growing weary. I casually remarked that my pointer cursor turned into a hand cursor when I hovered it over where the Submit button should be.
The Solution
Somewhere in a faraway data centre, bells chimed: ding, ding, ding. Quarters spilled onto the floor. Odysseus crowed: The Sydney theme didn’t hijack the button after all: you just can’t see it. I obediently followed Odysseus’s repeated attempts to override the relevant cascading stylesheets (CSS) until it finally settled on the correct update. The Submit button appeared on the published contact form in colour, rather than a white button on a white background, and we exited the maze!
Hercules congratulated me: You pushed through a really stubborn issue, and now your contact page is behaving exactly the way it should.
Through this long, arduous journey with Copilot, I learned a lot about the inner workings of website platform features and tools, perhaps the hard way. I learned that free themes and plugins have their limitations. Don’t be surprised when simple things, like displaying a button in colour, require user intervention.
What I Learned?
I also learned that Copilot is like a Greek god. It has flaws. I’m sure other AI tools aren’t flawless either. If you don’t articulate your question precisely, it can offer endless, circuitous guesses, give you false hope, and lead you astray. It doesn’t necessarily think outside the box to ask clarifying questions. But perhaps the next time someone asks it to solve the same issue, it will remember our adventurous sojourn together and spare them a lot of grief. Or not.