WordPress Google Forms v0.56-beta-4 available

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I have released beta-4 of WordPress Google Forms.  This beta update addresses a problem reported where the settings for the form weren’t being saved correctly (e.g. turning Title on would not appear to be saved).

It turns out that the settings were saved correctly so the form would work as desired however subsequent edits to the form would return all of the settings to the default state which would then be saved unless the author noted they were wrong and set them correctly again.

The logic to pre-populating the current state of the form’s settings was faulty.  This beta update fixes this bug.

Google Forms Beta (7741 downloads )

WordPress Google Form v0.56-beta-3 available

This evening I released beta-3 of WordPress Google Form.  This release addresses a requested feature to have “pre-populated fields which disappear when clicked“.

My solution to this request was to implement the placeholder attribute for the input tag.  This is also much easier than expecting users to decipher the complex URL requirements to pass default values to a form.  The difference between a placeholder and a default value is the placeholder value cannot be submitted.  In the case of wanting to have something like “email address”, which isn’t a valid email address, in the form field as a “placeholder”, using the placeholder attribute is a better solution.  At least I think so.

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Placeholder values are defined when the form is added as a Custom Post Type.

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Like the custom validation rules, to use placeholders you will need to know the name attribute for the field you are defining a placeholder for.  Refer to this post I wrote on Advanced Validation to learn how to identify the field name.

Google Forms Beta (7741 downloads )

WordPress Google Form v0.56-beta-1 available

I have posted the initial beta version of WordPress Google Form v0.56.  This preliminary release has bug fixes to handle UTF-8 characters in from values and also handles the unusual case where a tab character is embedded in the form response value.

The embedded tab issue was particularly tricky to track down as it is (a) it wasn’t obvious since web browsers render tabs as white space and (b) it isn’t easy to actually enter a tab into an HTML form (which is how Google Forms are created).  I was able to embed a tab in a form response by pasting some text from Word.  It turns out the user that had the problem I was trying to resolve had done the exact same thing.

Handling the tabs turned out to be tricky so initially I thought I thought I might have to simply detect them and display a warning but in the end I was able to find a viable solution.

This beta release also has the first implementation of Transients for the initial rendering of a form.  This use case is likely not all that common but came from a user who had four (4) forms on a single page and was seeing timeouts from Google.  Caching the initial rendering of the form will help in this situation.  Thanks to Camilo Flores for providing a patch which I based the implementation on.

Google Forms Beta (7741 downloads )

Google Updates Forms Again

Sometime in the past few days (as near as I can tell) Google has updated Forms again.  This most recent update adds the H5F Javascript library to do required field checking.  This functionality is similar to the jQuery Validation plugin solution I included in WordPress Google Form a number of months ago.

This new validation functionality doesn’t appear in all forms, just those created after a certain date.  Existing forms do not appear to have this new functionality embedded in it.

So how do I know if I have the new functionality?  The most obvious sign is the appearance of the text “This is a required question” underneath the form element.

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It is fairly easy to make these messages go away since they are redundant with the plugin functionality.

You can add the following to your Custom CSS (form specific or global):

div.required-message {
    display: none;
}

This will hide the messages and the form reverts to looking as it did prior to Google’s latest change.

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I will likely include this CSS as part of the default CSS in the next update but I need to do a little more testing first.

WordPress Google Form v0.55 released

Yesterday WordPress 3.6 was released.  The bundled version of jQuery was updated to 1.10 which broke the jQuery Columnizer plugin I use to split a form into columns.  The result was jQuery would go into an infinite loop and eventually you would have to kill the page.

Fortunately someone had already encountered this problem and provided a patch to the jQuery plugin.  I have incorporated the patch and released v0.55.  If you’re running WordPress 3.6, this is a critical release.  Older versions should continue to run correctly.

You can find v0.55 on your WordPress Dashboard or in the plugin repository.

WordPress Google Form v0.54 released

This morning I released v0.54 of WordPress Google Form.  It has been a while since I’ve had any bug reports for the current version or the beta version.  Things appear pretty stable.

  • Added internationalization support for jQuery Validation messages.
  • New language support files.
  • New jQuery Validation based custom validation option.
  • Fixed problem with escaped characters ending up in Google spreadsheet.
  • Moved transport control out of debug module and into core code so it can be a permanent setting for some server environments.
  • Fixed PHP warning messages which happen with Logging Enabled when some of the server variables don’t exist.
  • Fixed bug with Form Submission Log setting stickiness.
  • Added an optional CAPTCHA message which will appear below the CAPTCHA input when set.

WordPress Google Form v0.54-beta-7 now available

I have just posted what I hope is the final beta release of WordPress Google Form v0.54.  This latest beta release fixes a couple of minor issues, notably the lack of stickiness on the Form Submission Log setting and adds one new feature.  You can now define a CAPTCHA message to appear below the CAPTCHA input box.  These two screen shots show the information on the Plugin Settings page and the result when the form is rendered.  The message is placed in a DIV which has the class “wpgform-captcha-description” so it can be styled as needed.

Google Forms Beta (7741 downloads )

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WordPress Google Form v0.54-beta-4 now available

This evening I posted a new beta release (#4) of WordPress Google Form v0.54.  This beta release addresses a problem where values with escape characters and/or other encoded characters end up in the response spreadsheet.

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As you can see in the image above, the values are escaped until the final entry.  This fix needs some testing to make sure it doesn’t break anything, please try it out and let me know how you make out.

Google Forms Beta (7741 downloads )

WordPress Google Form v0.54-beta-3 now available

A quick bump to beta-3 for WordPress Google Form v0.54 to fix a problem which resulted in a PHP error message due to missing post meta data for field validation.  Forgot to account for the situation where a form hasn’t defined any fields to validate!

Google Forms Beta (7741 downloads )