This afternoon I released v0.45 of my WordPress Google Form plugin. After validating the changes I made in the beta with a user who was dealing with a polluted jQuery script, it looks like moving the jQuery script into the WordPress footer action is the right answer.
You can find the update in the WordPress Plugin Repository or as an update on your WordPress Dashboard.
This evening I released v0.43 of my WordPress Google Form plugin. This update addresses a couple of bugs and fixes a few more issues with the optional CSS prefix. It also addresses a potentially serious problem when using Debug Mode with PHP version prior to 5.3.
This morning I released v0.42 of my WordPress Google Form plugin. This version fixes a number of minor bugs, one major bug, and adds some new functionality. Of particular note is the ability to add a CAPTCHA to your Google Form to help reduce SPAM form submissions.
You can find the update in the WordPress Plugin Repository or as an Update on your WordPress Dashboard.
This afternoon I made a beta version of WordPress Google Form v0.41 available for download from this site. I have not posted this version to the WordPress plugin repository yet as I’d like to get some additional testing done on it before doing so.
There are a could of significant new features and a few bug fixes in this version.
Download the beta release and please let me know if you run into any issues. You can see an example of the CAPTCHA and new Validation options on my Test Bed Form.
Google Forms Beta (8583 downloads )I work much better in the early morning than I do at night. Always have. Last night I was working on CAPTCHA support for WordPress Google Form and for the life of me, couldn’t figure what was causing a jQuery syntax error. Granted, working on my laptop in my truck in the dark while at my daughter’s soccer practice isn’t the ideal work location but that was my situation when I had some cycles to look at it.
This morning I looked at it again, made one minor change and the syntax error was obvious. Syntax error fixed and my CAPTCHA solution appears to be working. I am going to clean up some debug code and then post a beta release for testing. Hopefully I will have this formally released in the next day or two.
Over the past year one of the most common requests I’ve received is to add some sort of CAPTCHA support to WordPress Google Form. I don’t deny the need for CAPTCHA but it has never been a real high priority for me personally as I didn’t have a pressing need and more importantly, because Google Forms don’t support CAPTCHA, there wasn’t an easy and/or obvious solution.
However, recently my Help and Support Form has been receiving quite a few SPAM submissions to the point it is annoying. So now I have a vested interest in finding a solution.
Because Google Forms don’t support a CAPTCHA solution, anything I do has to be done on the WordPress side as part of the short code processing. This makes it a bit of a challenge because the only way to support CAPTCHA is to add more content to a form.
Essentially what I need to do is generate HTML and insert it into the form and then process it and validate it upon form submission which then can’t progress if the CAPTCHA validation fails. There are quite a few different CAPTCHA solutions, I wanted to find one that would integrate well with how WordPress Google Form works.
Since I needed to modify the HTML I immediately thought a jQuery solution would be the best bet as (a) I am already using jQuery in several places and (b) what better way to manipulate HTML than using jQuery! A Google search yielded this list of 10 jQuery CAPTCHA plugins. After looking through them I leaned toward QapTcha however in investigating it, using QapTcha would be a little more involved that I wanted. I also considered jQuery Real Person but eliminated it as too cumbersome to integrate. I may go back and look at these two again as both are interesting but both are more invasive than I was willing to take on right now.
I subsequently found another list of 10 jQuery CAPTCHA plugins. This list had some overlap with the other list but one entry caught my eye: #6 – jQueryValidate Plugin plus PHP equals CAPTCHA It caught my eye because I had previously used the jQuery Validate plugin within WordPress Google Form for validating required fields (it was eliminated later when it was no longer necessary as validation came from Google when I added support for multi-page forms). After reading the article, I realized I could very easily implement a similar solution and more importantly, I could resurrect the jQuery Validate code from an earlier version of the plugin.
So that is where I am headed. Getting an initial CAPTCHA on the page was pretty simple. What proved to be the challenge was to only display the CAPTCHA when the Submit button is present. It took me a little while to figure out the jQuery selector but as I write this post, I have the basics of a simple math CAPTCHA working for both single page and multi-page Google Forms.
I have decided to add the fields using the same classes that Google uses for their forms so any styling done using the Google CSS rules will also apply to the CAPTCHA fields.
If you want to test this out before I release it feel free to get in touch with me and I’ll make an early build available. By no means is this solution fool proof but it should help eliminate some form SPAM and that is what I am currently trying to do.
I’ve had my Help and Support form for my WordPress Google Form plugin online since April and it has greatly improved my ability to help people use my plugin. I get all of the information at one time where as before it took several passes via email to get all of the data I typically need to resolve an issue.
Up until about two weeks ago, I never got any spam via the form but lately I’ve been receiving 2-3 form submissions per day that contain nothing but gibberish. So it got me thinking about how to implement a Captcha solution. A Captcha solution has been requested several times and I’ve never looked at it seriously because (a) Google doesn’t support it and (b) it wasn’t something I thought was terribly important. I am rethinking my position how important it is! 😉
The fact that Google doesn’t support a Captcha solution is the biggest hurdle. The challenge is to add the necessary code to the HTML generated by Google, recognize and process the Captcha, and it is passes, remove the Captcha input prior to submitting the form values to Google for processing. This becomes a more complicated issue on a multi-page form: Does every page have a Captcha or only the last page with the Submit button?
I don’t have a solution yet but this is something I am noodling on as I have some spare cycles. The solution will almost certainly be jQuery based, I can’t think of a better way to do it and I am already using jQuery to process radio button inputs so they can be converted from PHP style inputs on the WordPress side to Python style inputs on the Google side.
This afternoon I released v0.35 of my WordPress Google Form plugin. Included in this update are:
You can find the latest version of WordPress Google Form in the WordPress Plugin repository or as a Dashboard Update.
This morning I pushed the v4.3.14 update to Email Users to the WordPress plugin repository. This update adds a new Spanish language translation, updates the French language translation, and fixes a problem where users who have either the capability to send to a single user OR the capability to send to multiple users, but not both, receive a permission denied error when trying to send email. A number of the permission errors have also been updated so they use the proper WordPress styling.
Similar to yesterday’s update, today I pushed out wpGForm v0.30. This version addresses an unusual problem which prevents the custom confirmation CSS from loading properly.
In some cases, it appears that a plugin or theme, through the use of a filter (likely the_content or wpautop), was inserting paragraph tags into the content which by itself isn’t a problem, however when enabled, wpGForm adds a custom CSS block to style the form during processing, so the CSS definition portion of the content ended up with paragraph tags in it. This results in CSS which won’t parse correctly and of course it never styles the form. I have updated the plugin to generate the CSS definition as a single line of text where it previously spanned several lines for readability purposes.
The update should appear on your Dashboard shortly and is also available from the WordPress Plugin Repository.