Tag Archives: Development

01.30.12
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Yet another update! WordPress Google Form v0.18 available

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!

01.29.12
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WordPress Google Form plugin v0.16 released

This 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.

01.28.12
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wpGForm Bugs in v0.15

I have been alerted to a couple of bugs in the current (v0.15) version of wpGForm that I am working on fixing.

  1. Select boxes do not retain their value when going back on multi-page forms.  I’ve already fixed this problem in my development build.
  2. Check boxes are not passing their values correctly.
  3. 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.

01.17.12
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WordPress Google Form v0.15 released

This 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.

01.17.12
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WordPress Google Form Bug with default CSS

There is a bug with the current (v0.14) version of WordPress Google Form in that it will always load the default CSS that is shipped with the plugin.  Using the setting to disable loading the default CSS is not saved so it is never turned off.  I am looking into this issue and will post an update as soon as it is fixed.

01.14.12
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Quick bump to v0.14 for WordPress Google Form

While looking at a CSS styling problem for someone I encountered a minor bug on the Options page.  The plugin wasn’t picking up the default options correctly and in some cases a PHP array index warning would appear on the Options page.  This bug has been fixed and I’ve released v0.14.  You can download it from the WordPress plugin repository or update it from the Dashboard.

01.14.12
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WordPress Google Form v0.13 fixes “back” bug

I have just committed v0.13 to the WordPress plugin repository.  An update should appear in your WordPress Dashboard fairly soon.  This update fixes a problem when using multi-page Google Forms which have radio buttons and check boxes on them.  When the “Back” button was selected to view the previous page of the form, the previously selected values were not retained.  This bug has been fixed and the “Back” and “Continue” buttons now work as expected.

01.08.12
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wpGForm v0.11 beta update

This morning I posted an updated wpGForm v0.11 beta release.  This updated beta introduces two new shortcode attributes:

  • title=’on|off’ – Show (default) or remove the Google Form title.  The title is often redundant with the WordPress post or page title, this attribute will allow you to remove the title from the HTML displayed within the WordPress context.
  • maph1h2=’on|off’ – Map H1 elements (usually just the title) on the Google Form to H2 elements.  This allows you to retain the form title from the Google Form but map it’s H1 tags to H2 tags which prevents multiple H1 tags from appearing on the WordPress page (which I understand is an SEO no-no).

This build also includes default CSS definitions for div.ss-q-help classes.  Why the help text appears adjacent to the question as opposed to on top of it is a question comes up pretty frequently.  This CSS makes the output more consistent with how Google presents the form so I’ve decided it should be the default.

label.ss-q-help {
    display: block;
}

I’ve also started removing debug and obsolete code.

[download#7]
12.13.11
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WordPress 3.3 and WordPress Google Form?

The answer is:  I don’t know yet.  WordPress 3.3 came out last night and I am just playing with it now.  One of the key features of WordPress 3.3 is the inclusion of the complete JQuery UI library.  This definitely affects wpGForm because I am loading one of the UI libraries that wasn’t previously included from Microsoft’s CDN.  That will no longer be necessary (yeah!).  I guess the question now is what to do about backward compatibility with older versions of WordPress.

Historically I’ve just put a stake in the ground and moved on but wpGForm is the first WordPress theme or plugin that I’ve done that has quite a few users so I’ll probably implement some sort of version detection and conditionally load the UI library from the CDN if running an older version of WordPress.  A little more work for me but probably the right answer.

11.29.11
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WordPress Google Form bug fix

In the process of trying to solve the multipage Google Form problem, I found a bug with the “Confirmation” page.  When a custom confirmation page isn’t supplied, the plugin is supposed to use the default Google conformation page.  It currently isn’t, instead the page the form is on is rendered again.  This is incorrect behavior and I’ve fixed it in my development thread and it will appear in the next release.