Author Archives: Mike Walsh

04.16.12
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wp-SwimTeam and WordPress Multi-Site

I’ve had a couple requests to support WordPress multi-site installations with wp-SwimTeam.  The Tab Model and Form Processor I use require some URL manipulation to work correctly and my original implementation works fine for “normal” installations but breaks when installed in a sub-directory which is pretty common with WordPress multi-site.  I’ve put off fixing in favor of other things but recently did some work on another project which got me thinking about the URL problem.

After getting the Event Module done I decided to take a look at fixing the URL problem and found it wasn’t too hard to fix.  The bigger problem was how pervasive my broken solution was!  I think I have found every place which required a fix.  Before I release an update I’d really like someone to try it with multi-site and give me some feedback.

[download#14#image]
04.15.12
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wp-SwimTeam v1.18.747 released

This afternoon I released v1.18.747 of wp-SwimTeam.  This release includes what I am calling Phase 1 of the new Event Model.  The event model has been completely overhauled in anticipation of being able to generate Meet Entry files in SDIF format directly from wp-SwimTeam.  The whole Events tab looks and works differently.  Events are collected into what I call Event Groups.  This release adds the ability to import events from a Hy-tek Events File (.hyv).  Events are managed (added, deleted, imported, re-ordered, etc.) within the context of an event group.  In Phase 2 events will be connected to a swim meet via an event group although the swim meet will still retain the ability to re-order the events on a meet by meet basis.

Key features in this release are:

  • Phase 1 of overhauled Event Model is complete. The new Event Model introduces the concept of Event Groups. Events are now defined in the context of an Event Group. Swim meets currently do not have any connection to Events but that will chance in a release fairly shortly in Phase 2.
  • Added ability to import events from a Hy-tek Events File (.hyv) into an Event Group.
  • Added ability to delete all events from an Event Group.
  • Changed Google Maps API Key from required to optional. If the API key hasn’t been entered, wp-SwimTeam will now gracefully work without it.

I changed a lot of code in this release, if you run into anything odd or functionality that isn’t working or behaves differently, let me know ASAP and I’ll do my best to fix it quickly.  Now that I am back to a stable code base I should be able to turn bug fixes pretty quickly.  That is hard to do when you’re doing a bunch of remodeling!

This release has been committed to the WordPress Plugin Repository so you should an update notification on your Dashboard.  You can also download it and manually update it from the Download & Installation Page.

Edit (4/16/2012 @ 10:07 AM):  This update includes a database update so you must de-activate and re-activate the plugin after updating to have the database upgrade run.  One of these days I’ll figure out a more elegant way to do this!

04.14.12
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Update on Events

I’ve been working on Events quite a bit over the last couple of days.  At this point I have all of the Event Management working again including the ability to import a Hy-tek Events File (.hyv).  I have not gotten to the point where I can connect the events to a swim meet but I don’t think that will take too long.  I will likely release an update with the progress I have to date.  Even with Events unfinished, it actually does more than the old Events Model does.  I have also fixed a few other odds and ends that I’d like to make sure get released sooner rather than later.

04.09.12
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wpGForm v0.28 released

This morning I released an update to my WordPress Google Form plugin.  I can only assume very few people are using the email confirmation feature because it wasn’t working and I didn’t hear about it until this past weekend!  The email confirmation feature (add the attribute email=’on’ to your short code) will notify the WordPress administrator that a form submission has been made.

The update is now committed and should appear on your WordPress Dashboard shortly.

03.29.12
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More on Event Groups

As I continue to work away on Event Groups and Event Management overall, I have realized that what I had implemented earlier was really poorly thought out.  The way I had defined events and assigned them to a swim meet really isn’t very useful.  The Event model will change quite a bit as I flush this out.  It is possible that it will be necessary to delete any existing events and redefine them using the new model.  I haven’t completely worked it out yet but that is likely where I am headed.  It makes the code too ugly to try and deal with old data that really isn’t used for anything in the new model.

I hope to have a release soon which has the base functionality done since I’ve also fixed a few other odds and ends while I’ve been in the code.

03.28.12
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WordPress Google Form v0.27 released

This afternoon I have released v0.27 of my WordPress Google Form (aka wpGForm) plugin.  This release has some new functionality but more importantly, reverts the custom confirmation page to the redirect method which was present from v0.11 to v0.025.

If you prefer the AJAX style custom confirmation, which I do, it is still available by adding the short code attribute style=’ajax’ to your gform short code.

Changes for v0.27 are:

  • Added ability to check and warn for old and/or unsupported browsers. There is an option on the WordPress Google Form settings page to enable this check. When an old or unsupported browser is detected, a message will be displayed on top of the form. The browser check is based on the same functionality that WordPress uses on the Dashboard.
  • Changed default custom confirmation behavior has reverted back to using a javascript redirect as it did from v0.11 through v0.25.
  • Added new shortcode attribute, style, to control how confirmation pages should be handled. There are two options: style=’redirect’ which is the default and style=’ajax’which loads the page content via AJAX.
  • Added new CSS classes to support errors and warnings for the browser check and the inability to load Google Forms.
  • Cleaned up Options page GUI.
03.28.12
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Highlighting Missing Fields on a Google Form

A user of my WordPress Google Form plugin asked how to highlight the required fields on a form but only after submitting for the form without providing all of the necessary fields.  Essentially, how show an error more clearly, much like Google does with their forms when run standalone.

Here is a form that has required fields before it has been submitted:
Form with required fields before submission
Here is a form that has required fields after it has been submitted:
Form with required fields after submission
Note that the form label is now red instead of the original black. To have the field text appear in red only after submitting the form without providing the required field, I used this CSS:
div.errorbox-bad div.ss-item-required label {
color: red;
}

If you use the prefix attribute in your short code you’ll need to adjust the class names accordingly. There are quite a few CSS tricks you can do to highlight errors and for experimenting, I recommend FireBug to tweak CSS without having to reload the page each time.

03.25.12
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Custom Confirmation problems with v0.26

In v0.26 of WordPress Google Form I changed how I was handling the custom confirmation page as many people had told me they didn’t like the redirection which caused a rapid page reload.  The new mechanism does a partial page reload using Ajax so the effect is much more graceful but I have heard from several people that it isn’t working for them.

If you are having this problem, please let me know so I can figure what is going on as it is working fine in my development and testing area.  I am still looking for a more graceful solution but the model I used before supporting multi-page forms simply won’t work with multi-page forms.  Multi-page forms are too important and commonplace not to support them.  Sort of a catch 22 for now but I am trying to find a viable alternative.

03.22.12
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wpGForm now has email notification

I’ve received a couple of requests to have an email notification sent out when a form is submitted. Today I released v0.26 which supports a new attribute (email=’on|off’) on the gform shortcode. By default email notification is off but when set to on, an email to the blog administrator will receive an e-mail indicating a form was submitted. The email also contains the URL for the form, and date and time the form was submitted.

While I was working on this version, I also decided to see if I could make the custom confirmation work like my original implementation which did not use a Javascript redirect.  I had switched to the redirect when I added support for multi-page forms because the mechanism I was using previously no longer worked.

Email can be sent in either HTML or Plain Text formats, there is a new option on the settings page.  By default email notifications are sent in HTML format.

The v0.26 version switches from a Javascript redirect to an Ajax page load using jQuery.  In my testing it seems to work pretty well and is much less intrusive than the redirect was.  Let me know if you run into any problems with it.

The v0.26 release is now available from the WordPress plugin repository and an update will appear on your WordPress Dashboard.

03.21.12
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WordPress Google Form v0.25 now available

Today I was alerted to an issue where my WordPress Google Form plugin wasn’t behaving correctly. This turned out to be due to the prefix attribute in the gform shortcode not handling it correctly. I have fixed the problem with the prefix attribute and a couple of other things and pushed out a release on the WordPress plugin respository.

Version 0.25

  • Fixed problem with checkbox processing when using the prefix attribute.
  • Fixed problem with hiding legal links when using the prefix attribute.
  • Fixed problem with legal=’off’ attribute not being processed correctly.