WordPress Google Form v0.61 is out!

After a couple days of testing and five beta releases, I have released WordPress Google Form v0.61.  This build supports multiple instances of the same form on a single page.

Why would you do this?  It turns out, it is a fairly common request.  A number of people have uses of the same form where some of the fields are hidden and preset (both features were added fairly recently) which allows them to present the form in different ways with seeded input while allowing the user to complete the rest.  Because the form instances are all based on the same Google Form, they will have the exact same entry elements with the exact same attribute IDs.  HTML does not allow multiple elements to have the same ID attribute, the behavior is unpredictable.

To support this new feature, a new parameter, uid, has been added to the wpgform shortcode.  The uid parameter can be set to any string which is legal for an HTML element ID attribute.  When the Google Form is processed, all of the attributes are modified to include the uid parameter to ensure they each have a unique value.

[wpgform id='879' uid='B-']

GForm_SS_69

This release also addresses some issues with missing CAPTCHAs which would happen under certain circumstances.  The jQuery generation is much cleaner now as well.

You can find this update in the WordPress plugin repository or on your WordPress Dashboard.

WordPress Google Form v0.61-beta-5 available

Another beta update, #5, for WordPress Google Form v0.61.  This update fixes a couple more issues with validation which resulted in some extra jQuery content that was malformed.  It only happened IF validation was enabled but no custom validation rules were defined.

Google Forms Beta (7742 downloads )

WordPress Google Form v0.61-beta-4 now available

I have just uploaded beta-4 of WordPress Google Form v0.61. This build corrects a couple more jQuery issues when using multiple instances of a form on the same page. In order to use multiple instances of the same form on a single page, you must use the uid parameter with the wpgform shortcode. Usage of this new parameter is outlined in the v0.61-beta-1 announcement.

The uid parameter is not supported in the deprecated gform shortcode.

Please download and test this beta release, all feedback is much appreciated.

Google Forms Beta (7742 downloads )

WordPress Google Form v0.61-beta-2 available

The second beta build of WordPress Google Form v0.61 is now available.  This beta build addresses some jQuery syntax errors introduced in the process of supporting multiple form instances.  It also addresses a bug where the CAPTCHA would not be output as part of the form under certain circumstances.

Please download and test this new build if you have time and report anything which isn’t working.

Google Forms Beta (7742 downloads )

WordPress Google Form v0.61-beta-1 available

About a week ago I was approached with an interesting problem.  A user wanted to have the same form on single page three times.  Three instances of the same form.  Each instance would have some hidden values to determine which form was submitted.

The problem was by putting the same exact form on the page multiple times, a lot of the content (id and name attributes) was duplicated and as such, caused problems upon submission or even trying to move from field to field on the form.  The current (v0.60) version of the plugin is effectively broken for multiple forms except in the simplest of cases (no CAPTCHA, validation, presets, etc.).

I’ve come up with a solution that needs some testing.  I’ve added a new short code attribute to the wpgform shortcode which takes a string value and uses it as a unique identifier to ensure the replicated fields are actually unique in the source HTML.

In the image below you can see the text “B-” has been prepended to the id attribute for the form tag and an input tag.  The “B-” was the value of the uid parameter in the shortcode for the form.

[wpgform id='879' uid='B-']

GForm_SS_69

Download this beta version and run it through its paces.  The ripple effect of this change across the code was pretty significant so I’d like to make sure it didn’t break anything.

Google Forms Beta (7742 downloads )

WordPress Google Form v0.59 released

After I have not had any reports of issues since releasing beta-3 so I have pushed out the formal release.  You can find v0.59 in the WordPress plugin repository or on your Dashboard.

Enhancements and Bug Fixes in v0.59:

  • Added ability to preset values for Google form as part of WordPress URL.
  • Added new CSS declarations to default plugin CSS to account for recent changes by Google to Forms.
  • Added ability to define fields as “hidden” and preset with a user defined or system defined value.
  • Fixed validation limitation which only allowed one validation rule per input.
  • Added basic support (CSS, jQuery) to use WordPress Google Form to view a Google Spreadsheet within WordPress.

WordPress Google Form v0.59-beta-3 now available

The beta-3 release of WordPress Google Form v0.59 is now available for testing.  This latest update includes basic support for using the plugin to embed Google Spreadsheets in WordPress (yes, it can do that – see this post).  When you use the published HTML page URL for a Google Spreadsheet as the URL source when defining a Google Form, you will end up with something which looks like this:

GForm_SS_68

You can view this spreadsheet/form page here.  You can use form specific Custom CSS to tailor the table to meet your needs too.  I used the following Custom CSS to get the columns evenly spaced:

tr.rShim ~ tr td { width: 33% !important;}

Google Forms Beta (7742 downloads )

wpGForm Unintended Functionality

For the past couple days I have been helping a user who was running into some problems with WordPress Google Form.  There are two threads on the WordPress Support Forum (here and here) where we went back and forth with me trying to understand his problem.  Eventually we moved to email so he could send me some screen shots as he wasn’t working on a live site.

As you can see from the support threads, I was rather confused as to what the user was trying to do.  It turns out, this user was using WordPress Google Form to display a Google Spreadsheet as opposed to a Google Form.  Once I understood what the user was doing the questions made a whole lot more sense.

The part which still didn’t make sense was why he was using WordPress Google Form to display the spreadsheet instead of a plugin dedicated for the task (e.g. Inline Google Spreadsheet Viewer).  I had never tried using my plugin to view a spreadsheet as it was never designed for that purpose.

As it turns out, for the most part it works.  If you publish a spreadsheet and use the URL when defining a Google Form, you will end up with something which looks like this:

GForm_SS_65

Surprisingly, it doesn’t look all that bad.  With a little bit of Custom CSS, it could actually look pretty good.  Here is some form specific Custom CSS I added to the form definition:

td.hd {
 display: none;
}
tr.rShim td {
 width: auto !important;
}
div div span.powered {
 display: none;
}
div.listview {
 display: none;
}

The result now looks pretty good.

GForm_SS_66

The header rows and and the table content are actually output by Google in separate tables.  It would be nice if they were in a single table – I am not sure of the logic behind having them as separate tables but that is what Google generates.

I am adding some new functionality to support this unusual usage of the plugin.  Because the Google “Powered By” block contains a link to the original spreadsheet, which often times is a undesirable, if the Legal option is turned off for the defined form, the “Powered By” block will be removed with jQuery.

I am also going to add some basic CSS (like above) to the default CSS to support this as well.  Look for a new beta release shortly.

Email Users v4.6.2 released

This morning I released version 4.6.2 of Email Users.  This release addresses several translation issues and updates the Bulgarian translation.  More importantly, this release adds an integration with ItThinx Groups!  This new feature is one that has been requested several times and I finally had the time to work on it.

You can download the update from the WordPress plugin repository or find the update on your Dashboard.