Mike Walsh's random thoughts and musings …
WordPress
Sandbox-LEGO theme v3.0.368 available
079 days
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
081 days
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 v0.23
096 days
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
0Yesterday 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
3106 days
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
6109 days
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
0This 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
1112 days
I have been alerted to a couple of bugs in the current (v0.15) version of wpGForm that I am working on fixing.
- Select boxes do not retain their value when going back on multi-page forms. I’ve already fixed this problem in my development build.
- Check boxes are not passing their values correctly.
- 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.
Why Doesn’t My Form Render?
0114 days
I typically get asked questions several times a week from people trying to use my WordPress Google Form plugin. The most common problem I see is incorrect shortcode syntax which isn’t real obvious. If you use the visual editor (which I do) when composing a post of page which includes the gform shortcode, pasting the URL for the Google Form will frequently include the pasted text as a link. Take a look at these two images.
At first glance the text appears the same and there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with the shortcode syntax. However, the first one will not render because it has a link embedded in it. As I said – not real obvious but leaving the link in will result in an error when trying to render the form.
Removing the link is easy, simply click anywhere within the link and use the Remove Link icon (broken chain) and you’ll end up with shortcode syntax similar to what you see in the second image.
WordPress Google Form v0.15 released
0This morning I fixed the problem with the default settings which caused any of the settings which are on by default, to be on no matter what. Even when the user would turn them off, the plugin would ignore the user setting which was being saved correctly, just ignored being ignored by the during the default check.
I also finished removing the jQuery-Validate plugin as it is no longer used as well as a bunch of debug code and functions which are no longer used. Updates should appear on your Dashboard soon and it is already available for download in the WordPress plugin repository.
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