WordPress Google Form v0.59-beta-3 now available

The beta-3 release of WordPress Google Form v0.59 is now available for testing.  This latest update includes basic support for using the plugin to embed Google Spreadsheets in WordPress (yes, it can do that – see this post).  When you use the published HTML page URL for a Google Spreadsheet as the URL source when defining a Google Form, you will end up with something which looks like this:

GForm_SS_68

You can view this spreadsheet/form page here.  You can use form specific Custom CSS to tailor the table to meet your needs too.  I used the following Custom CSS to get the columns evenly spaced:

tr.rShim ~ tr td { width: 33% !important;}

Google Forms Beta (7982 downloads )

wpGForm Unintended Functionality

For the past couple days I have been helping a user who was running into some problems with WordPress Google Form.  There are two threads on the WordPress Support Forum (here and here) where we went back and forth with me trying to understand his problem.  Eventually we moved to email so he could send me some screen shots as he wasn’t working on a live site.

As you can see from the support threads, I was rather confused as to what the user was trying to do.  It turns out, this user was using WordPress Google Form to display a Google Spreadsheet as opposed to a Google Form.  Once I understood what the user was doing the questions made a whole lot more sense.

The part which still didn’t make sense was why he was using WordPress Google Form to display the spreadsheet instead of a plugin dedicated for the task (e.g. Inline Google Spreadsheet Viewer).  I had never tried using my plugin to view a spreadsheet as it was never designed for that purpose.

As it turns out, for the most part it works.  If you publish a spreadsheet and use the URL when defining a Google Form, you will end up with something which looks like this:

GForm_SS_65

Surprisingly, it doesn’t look all that bad.  With a little bit of Custom CSS, it could actually look pretty good.  Here is some form specific Custom CSS I added to the form definition:

td.hd {
 display: none;
}
tr.rShim td {
 width: auto !important;
}
div div span.powered {
 display: none;
}
div.listview {
 display: none;
}

The result now looks pretty good.

GForm_SS_66

The header rows and and the table content are actually output by Google in separate tables.  It would be nice if they were in a single table – I am not sure of the logic behind having them as separate tables but that is what Google generates.

I am adding some new functionality to support this unusual usage of the plugin.  Because the Google “Powered By” block contains a link to the original spreadsheet, which often times is a undesirable, if the Legal option is turned off for the defined form, the “Powered By” block will be removed with jQuery.

I am also going to add some basic CSS (like above) to the default CSS to support this as well.  Look for a new beta release shortly.

WordPress Google Form v0.59-beta-2 now available

This morning I released beta-2 of WordPress Google Form v0.59.  This build introduces one new feature (hidden fields) and fixes one limitation (validation rules).

Much like validation rules and placeholders, an input field can now be defined as hidden.  When a field is defined as hidden, it does not appear to the user when they view the form and the value is set to a fixed value (e.g. a static string) or to something WordPress derives (e.g. the user’s IP address).

GForm_SS_64

The format of the field name is exactly the same as used for validation and placeholders.

Validation has been improved and the limitation of one validation rule per field has been lifted.  You can now define multiple validation rules for a single field.  Simply enter the field name for each separate type of validation.

Google Forms Beta (7982 downloads )

Email Users v4.6.2-beta-1 available

This morning I posted the first beta release (beta-1) of Email Users 4.6.2.  This release includes integration with the ItThinx Groups plugin.  I also took the opportunity to refactor the code for integration so code isn’t unnecessarily loaded when a plugin isn’t installed and clean up the plugin’s ReadMe file.

If you use ItThinx Groups I would appreciate any feedback you can provide.

Email Users Beta (5010 downloads )

WordPress Google Form v0.59-beta-1 available

I have posted WordPress Google Form v0.59-beta-1 in response to a request to have the ability to preset form values by passing a parameter as part of the WordPress URL.   This is an interesting request so I did some work on it this morning and it turned out it wasn’t to difficult to implement.

Much like custom field validation and presets, this new functionality builds upon the name of the field that you want to preset.  Google has a way to preset values, the field name is passed as a parameter with a value.  This new functionality does much the same but pulls it back to WordPress for processing.

Using my Validation Demo form as an example, here are two URLs:

  1. Standard URL
  2. Standard URL with preset values

As you can see, the second URL will have the first two fields prefilled with the values which were part of the URL.  The following was appended to the URL.  The specific parameter names (e.g. entry.1666054688) had to discovered by examining the source Google Form.

?entry.1666054688=joe@example.com&entry.327623672=www.yahoo.com

GForm_SS_63

Email Users v4.6.0 released

This morning I released version 4.6.0 of Email Users.  This release addresses the problems with addresses appearing in the CC header instead of the BCC header which cropped up in v4.5.4 and v4.5.5.  This version has gone through quite a bit of testing to ensure the problem with addresses was fixed.  In addition to this critical fix, there are also a couple of minor new features now available.  If you were running Email Users v4.6.0-beta-4, this version is nearly identical.  The version is different and the default string for the new footer was trimmed eliminating the version number.

  • Significantly improved debug functionality to chase down mail header issues.
  • Check added to determine if wp_mail() has been overloaded by a theme or plugin.
  • Rewrite of mailusers_send_mail() fucntion to construct headers as arrays instead of as a single string. The string would sometimes not break correctly and recognize the Bcc: field.
  • Implemented new email footer option.
  • Cleaned up presentation of Options page.
  • Implemented new omit display names option.
  • Updated language translation files.

You can find this update in the WordPress plugin repository or on your Dashboard.

WordPress Google Form v0.58 released

This morning I formally release v0.58 of WordPress Google Form.  Thanks to everyone who did testing of the various beta releases.  The v0.58 release includes a number of improvements to deal with special characters either in responses or in questions.

  1. Fixed bug when radio button and checkbox responses contained apostrophe characters.
  2. Fixed bug when text entry box content contained an ampersand which ended up encoded in the Google sheet.
  3. Fixed bug(s) with plugin settings which are controlled with checkboxes not being able to be unchecked.
  4. Added Reset button to return plugin settings to their default state.
  5. Fixed problem handling newlines (carriage returns) in textarea entries.

You can find the update on your WordPress Dashboard or in the WordPress Plugin Repository.  The released version is functionally the same as beta-3, only the version number is different.

Email Users v4.5.3-beta-3 now available

This afternoon I posted the third beta release of Email Users v4.5.3.  There is a pretty significant change in this build so I may bump to v4.6 when I release it.

Yesterday I posted an article about an odd Email Users problem I was looking at.  This build fixes (correctly) the problem encountered by that user by properly using get_users() instead of a complex SQL query to retrieve the information used to construct the User Settings page.

In addition to being properly constructed, the User Settings page has a number of fixes including proper sorting and the addition of Search (which I could never get working using the old query).

I’ve also addressed a couple of other very minor requests that came up recently in the WordPress Support Forum.

Email Users Beta (5010 downloads )

WordPress Google Form v0.57 released

This afternoon I released a minor update to WordPress Google Form. This update, v0.57 addresses a bug which prevented translation of the “What is” phrase used for CAPTCHA support.  It also includes updated language support files which were not updated in v0.56.

You can find the update in the WordPress Plugin Repository or on your Dashboard as an update.