Mike Walsh

Mike Walsh

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Posts by Mike Walsh

Possible Enhancements for wpGForm

2

Recently I have had a couple requests for enhancements to wpGForm. One of the recent ones was the ability to define hidden fields on a form to capture some data from a WordPress user.

Currently Google’s forms define fields like this:

<input id="entry_0" class="wpgform_ss-q-short" type="text" value="" name="entry.0.single">

It would not be too hard to add an attribute like hidden=’entry_0,entry_2,
entry_27′ to the shortcode. I could even do something like
hidden=’entry_0=email,entry_2=username,entry_27=first_name,entry_28=last_name’ where the “allowable” presets would have to map to the fields which can be returned by get_userdata() see:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_userdata Of course all of this predicates that the user is logged in so those fields exist.

I’ve also considered changing the plugin to allow for more complicated things – adding more options to the shortcode could get pretty cumbersome. What’ve I thought about is doing leveraging the Dashboard (using a Custom Post Type) to Manage Forms where you “Add” a form and the Dashbaord provides a GUI where all sorts of information would be added:

1. Form URL
2. Confirmation URL
3. Switches for all of the other options (legal, read-only, etc.)
4. More things I haven’t thought about

Forms could then be “Edited/Deleted/etc.” just like other post types. Then you’d simply embed the form using a simple shortcode like . The rest of the information would be stored inWordPress as custom Post Type fields. I’d probably define a new shortcode for this so the current one would continue to work but that is the general idea.

Thoughts?

Sandbox-LEGO theme v3.0.368 available

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After updating my Sandbox-SwimTeam theme, I turned to my Sandbox-LEGO theme.  Like Sandbox-SwimTeam, Sandbox-LEGO is built on top of Sandbox and shares quite a bit of the same feature set and code.  Once I updated Sandbox-SwimTeam, migrating the same changes over to Sandbox-LEGO was pretty straightforward.

If you have a LEGO web site, this a great theme for you!  You can see this theme in action on my CarolinaTrainBuilders.com web site (although I don’t do much with LEGO any more).  You can download the theme from the Sandbox-LEGO theme page.

Unlike the update to Sandbox-SwimTeam, this theme update will retain your settings even so you don’t have to re-enter them.  I need to migrate this same logic back to Sandbox-SwimTeam too now that I’ve figured out a solution I am happy with.

Sandbox-SwimTeam theme v3.0.360 available

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It has been a while since I touched my Sandbox-SwimTeam theme but with Swim Team season gearing up, it was time I did some maintenance as I had put it off last season.  A lot has changed in WordPress since I originally put this together almost four years ago.

I have just released v3.0.360 of the theme which you can download from the Sandbox-SwimTeam theme page.  This update has a lot of bug fixes, most of which bring it update to date with WordPress 3.3.  The big new feature is support for WordPress Navigation menus.

Important:  You will need to re-enter your theme settings!  The way theme settings are stored is different from the original implementation and there is much more checking done now.  The theme now properly  uses the WordPress Settings API.

I had wanted to build a new theme for our Swim Team this season but time to do so is elusive.  I’ve decided to do a short term fix and update Sandbox-SwimTeam which will give me some breathing room to work on a new theme over the next few months without impacting the swim team adversely.

WordPress Google Form v0.24 fixes UTF-8 bug

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Recently a couple people have reported problems with international (or UTF-8) characters. The UTF-8 characters were not being passed correctly from the form on the WordPress site on to Google. I had planned to look into the problem this coming weekend but a wpGForm user (cablop.net) beat me to it and has provided the fix (thank you very much!).

I have incorporated the fix and tested it and was able to submit a couple Spanish words that have UTF-8 characters. The update should appear on your Dashboard shortly.

WordPress Google Form v0.23

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This evening I released v0.23 of my WordPress Google Form plugin. This update fixes a situation where CSS declarations were output as plain text as part of the form. I believe the cause of this was due to an appearance theme for the form being specified in the Google Form Designer. The update should roll out via the WordPress Dashboard Update failrly soon.

WordPress Google Form update – v0.22

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Yesterday I received a report from someone using WordPress Google Form that their checkboxes weren’t working. This was very confusing to me because last weekend I spent a bunch of time fixing and testing the checkbox problem.

It turns out the jQuery script which fixes the checkboxes to work with PHP was never running. Why wasn’t it running? Because jQuery wasn’t ever loaded. Why wasn’t jQuery loaded? Because wpGForm never loaded it! It turned out the website which reported the problem was using a theme that doesn’t use jQuery and therefore never loaded it.

Well the WordPress Google Form plugin, which needs jQuery, didn’t load it either. I (and I can only assume other people) was never seeing a problem because either the theme or another plugin was loading jQuery.

The v0.22 update corrects this problem which was somewhat of a corner case, but a problem none the less.

WordPress Google Form minor update – v0.21

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This morning I have updated WordPress Google Form and fixed a number of documentation problems and added one minor new feature.  While I am not a big fan of Javascript Alerts, I had a request to allow a message to be displayed upon successful form submission.  I have added a new parameter (alert=’message’) to the gform short code to enable this new functionality.

[gform form='https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dEYwbGNYVG9TRUhXellMaDBuZ1RQTHc6MQ#gid=0' confirm='http://localhost/?page_id=435' alert='You da man!']

The new release should appear in the WordPress repository immediately and as Dashboard update fairly soon.

Yet another update! WordPress Google Form v0.18 available

6

I have just released another update to the WordPress Google Form plugin.  Within the HTML code that Google generates for their forms, each input field has  unique identifier (e.g entry.0.group, entry.47.group, entry.6.single, etc.).  There was a bug in the Regular Expression which incorrectly handled these identifiers when then had more than one digit.  This bug is fixed in v0.17.

Why do the identifiers need to be processed?  The need to “massage” the identifiers is due to the fact that WordPress is based on PHP and Google Forms are processed by Python.  The two languages handle passing form parameters slightly differently.  When the form is submitted on the WordPress side, the periods in the id are translated to underscores by PHP.  Inputs like check boxes which may contain multiple values are handled using arrays in PHP where as Python allows the use of the same identifier multiple times.  In order to submit the form values to Google, any value received as an array must be converted to a multi-value and the underscores need to be translated back to periods so they match the Python script on the Google side which actually processes the form and stores the result in a Google Spreadsheet.

There was a mistake in the logic which transforms the identifiers from PHP syntax to Python syntax.  It didn’t correctly handle more than one digit in the identifier resulting in the wrong identifier names being sent to Google.  This also caused loss of input values when a required field was not supplied.

Hopefully this will be the last problem!

WordPress Google Form plugin v0.16 released

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This morning I uploaded a new version of my WordPress Google Form plugin.  This update addresses the three items I noted in this post.  I also expanded the Test Bed Form I have  been using to develop and test the plugin.  If you’re curious, I have added the form to a page on this site.  If you run into a combination that isn’t working and I haven’t accounted for it in the test bed, please let me know and I’ll update my form.

I think I finally have Check Boxes working correctly.  They were a challenge because how PHP (which WordPress uses) pass arrays of information and Python (which Google Forms use for processing) are very different.  Thanks to a tip on the WordPress Hackers Mailing List to a utility called http://httpbin.org I was able to get my plugin to pass the parameters as Google expects them and everything seems to be working correctly.  The update should appear in your WordPress Dashboard fairly soon.

wpGForm Bugs in v0.15

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I have been alerted to a couple of bugs in the current (v0.15) version of wpGForm that I am working on fixing.

  1. Select boxes do not retain their value when going back on multi-page forms.  I’ve already fixed this problem in my development build.
  2. Check boxes are not passing their values correctly.
  3. Sometimes Radio buttons do not retain their values when going back on multi-page forms.

This third item is proving difficult to track down. It is odd that some questions with radio buttons work fine going back and forth between pages but others do not.  If I can fix the check boxes this morning I will likely release an update that addresses the first two bugs and keep working on the third problem.

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