This morning I released an update to my WordPress Google Form plugin. I can only assume very few people are using the email confirmation feature because it wasn’t working and I didn’t hear about it until this past weekend! The email confirmation feature (add the attribute email=’on’ to your short code) will notify the WordPress administrator that a form submission has been made.
The update is now committed and should appear on your WordPress Dashboard shortly.
This afternoon I have released v0.27 of my WordPress Google Form (aka wpGForm) plugin. This release has some new functionality but more importantly, reverts the custom confirmation page to the redirect method which was present from v0.11 to v0.025.
If you prefer the AJAX style custom confirmation, which I do, it is still available by adding the short code attribute style=’ajax’ to your gform short code.
Changes for v0.27 are:
A user of my WordPress Google Form plugin asked how to highlight the required fields on a form but only after submitting for the form without providing all of the necessary fields. Essentially, how show an error more clearly, much like Google does with their forms when run standalone.
Here is a form that has required fields before it has been submitted:
Here is a form that has required fields after it has been submitted:
Note that the form label is now red instead of the original black. To have the field text appear in red only after submitting the form without providing the required field, I used this CSS:
div.errorbox-bad div.ss-item-required label {
color: red;
}
If you use the prefix attribute in your short code you’ll need to adjust the class names accordingly. There are quite a few CSS tricks you can do to highlight errors and for experimenting, I recommend FireBug to tweak CSS without having to reload the page each time.
I’ve received a couple of requests to have an email notification sent out when a form is submitted. Today I released v0.26 which supports a new attribute (email=’on|off’) on the gform shortcode. By default email notification is off but when set to on, an email to the blog administrator will receive an e-mail indicating a form was submitted. The email also contains the URL for the form, and date and time the form was submitted.
While I was working on this version, I also decided to see if I could make the custom confirmation work like my original implementation which did not use a Javascript redirect. I had switched to the redirect when I added support for multi-page forms because the mechanism I was using previously no longer worked.
Email can be sent in either HTML or Plain Text formats, there is a new option on the settings page. By default email notifications are sent in HTML format.
The v0.26 version switches from a Javascript redirect to an Ajax page load using jQuery. In my testing it seems to work pretty well and is much less intrusive than the redirect was. Let me know if you run into any problems with it.
The v0.26 release is now available from the WordPress plugin repository and an update will appear on your WordPress Dashboard.
Today I was alerted to an issue where my WordPress Google Form plugin wasn’t behaving correctly. This turned out to be due to the prefix attribute in the gform shortcode not handling it correctly. I have fixed the problem with the prefix attribute and a couple of other things and pushed out a release on the WordPress plugin respository.
This morning I posed an update to my Sandbox-SwimTeam theme. This update addresses a number of CSS bugs which primarily affected the login page.
This evening I released a new version of the phpHtmlLib plugin which wp-SwimTeam depends on. This update addresses a number of PHP5 deprecated function warnings which are commonly seen when running under PHP5 with E_STRICT set. I also fixed an icon bug which appeared on the GUI widget used across wp-SwimTeam when there was no data to display.
The update also removes the documentation and examples from the version of the plugin hosted in the WordPress plugin repository since they are only useful for developers. A full version of the plugin including documentation and examples can be downloaded from the Download & Installation page.
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.
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.
Recently a couple people have reported problems with international (or UTF-8) characters. The UTF-8 characters were not being passed correctly from the form on the WordPress site on to Google. I had planned to look into the problem this coming weekend but a wpGForm user (cablop.net) beat me to it and has provided the fix (thank you very much!).
I have incorporated the fix and tested it and was able to submit a couple Spanish words that have UTF-8 characters. The update should appear on your Dashboard shortly.