With 70+ downloads of beta-2 and no issues reported, I feel pretty good about releasing v0.70 so this morning I pushed it out. There are no changes since the last beta version with the exception of the version number change.
You can find the update on your Dashboard or in the WordPress plugin repository.
This morning I pushed out Email Users 4.6.9. It contains a few fixes that I had been sitting on along with an updated German translation.
I had been delaying as I planned to incorporate a couple good suggestions which are on the support forum (e.g. hooks before an after sending mail) but I simply haven’t had the time to work on new features lately. There is also good suggestion on limiting debug output to Admin users which I also plan to add.
I didn’t want to sit on the fixes I have made any longer so went ahead and released 4.6.9. You can find the update on your Dashboard or in the WordPress plugin repository. The only difference between the released version and the last beta is the German translation file and the version number.
This weekend I spent some time looking at adding support for regular expressions as part of the Google Forms validation functionality. This seemed like a reasonable and useful request. I was surprised to find that the jQuery Validation plugin doesn’t offer regular expressions as a standard check however, I found a fairly simple solution on Stack Exchange.
It took me a little while to get it working as Saturday morning I went down a wrong path initially following another post I had found. When I first read the post I linked to above, I convinced myself that I didn’t want to use the AddMethod solution. I am not sure why, I guess it was because I haven’t been into the code in a while so I was trying to avoid it. It turns out it is definitely the right answer and fairly easy to implement.
The beta build also contains a Serbo Croation translation provided by Borisa Djuraskovic
of www.webhostinghub.com.
To see the new functionality in action, check out my Validation Demo Form where the last entry field must begin with a capital letter. The regular expression “[A-Z]” is used to match a capital letter when setting up the validation.
While looking into a Support request I discovered a bug in the generation of the jQuery validation script which caused a syntax error. This syntax error could potentially cause problems with redirection upon form submission.
While fixing the above bug I also added support for embedded images which had been requested recently. When you design your form Google now allows the insertion of images and now Google Forms will display them properly.
You can find this update on your Dashboard or in the WordPress plugin repository.
I have released a minor update to Email Users to fix a problem reported on the WordPress Support forum with PHP 5.5 compatibility. Additionally, this release of Email Users contains a Finnish translation.
You can find the update on your Dashboard or in the WordPress plugin repository.
I have been working on resolving a plugin conflict between WordPress SEO and Google Forms. Based on some help from the WordPress SEO plugin author I have made some small changes to Google Forms which I believe will alleviate the conflict.
I am looking for people who’ve been dealing with this problem to test this out, if you have a few minutes, please download this beta and give it a run through.
Google Forms Beta (8582 downloads )Yesterday on my flight to Phoenix I implemented a feature which was recently requested to use the To field for the recipient address when the BCC limit is set to 1. There is a new choice in the BCC Limit option on the Settings page:
If you’d like to test this new feature, download this beta build and report any issues you encounter. It will work with both Post/Page notifications as well as group emails. The only limitation is when used, the user’s email address will be placed in the To header without their display name.
Email Users Beta (5491 downloads )This afternoon I posted beta-1 of Email Users v4.6.6. This build addresses an issue reported on the Email Users support forum. The user reporting the issue was running into a feature that was actually designed into Email Users – the ability to email a user regardless of their Mass Email and Notification settings.
Based on the user’s use use case, I can understand the desire to prevent certain types of users from appearing in the User Recipient List. So I have added a new option to the settings page which will prevent users who do not have a role on the web site from appearing in the Recipient List.
Please report any issues with this new functionality ASAP and I will try to address them quickly.
I received a patch over the weekend from a Google Forms user which I have incorporated into beta-2 of v0.65. The patch changes how Google Forms loads the jQuery Validation plugin from the Microsoft CDN. The plugin is now loaded using a protocol relative URL. This change will eliminate the mixed content message which appears on sites using HTTPS.
There are a couple other minor fixes in this build as well, the most notable a flush of re-write rules upon plugin activation or de-activation in hopes that it will eliminate one of the most common questions I receive (why doesn’t my URL work when I click the View Form button?).
Google Forms Beta (8582 downloads )Shortly after releasing v0.64 I received a report of data corruption from a Google Forms user. I took this report very seriously and immediately reverted the stable tag for Google Forms back to v0.63 while I looked into this users report. The last thing I wanted to do was introduce a bug which resulted in corrupted posts.
I spent some time looking through my plugin code and tried a couple experiments but could not replicate the behavior the user reported. My gut feel was we’re dealing with a plugin conflict however it is hard to know for sure.
The user and I ended up swapping some email and I got a list of plugins they were running. I initially thought I would try and replicate their problem by installing the same set of plugins but quickly figured out that wasn’t possible. Nor was it possible to examine all of the code for the plugins looking for what I suspected was a conflict in a “save_post” action or call to wp_update_post().
In doing some research I learned (unfortunately I can’t find it in the Codex) that beginning in WordPress 3.7 there is a new save_post action for Custom Post Types: save_post_{$post_type} Whoo-hoo! This didn’t exist when I originally wrote Google Forms, so my plugin, much like many other plugins which define Custom Post Types, define a save_action which then has to determine if the post is relevant to the plugin or not before doing anything to it.
I quickly implemented the new action and removed the old action and Google Forms is behaving as it should in my testing. I have uploaded this latest beta to my site and beat on it a bit and cannot corrupt any data. I am very confident now that Google Forms should never touch anything other than it’s own post data.
Because of the reported corruption, I would encourage beta testers to backup their database before installing this update JUST TO BE SAFE but I think the corruption risk is very low. Please let me know if you run into anything unusual.
In this v0.65 beta I have also changed the name of the plugin from “WordPress Google Form” to “Google Forms” as it is more representative and the plugin repository now prohibits the use of “WordPress” in a plugin name. There is a chance you’ll have to reactivate the plugin depending on how you install this beta.
Google Forms Beta (8582 downloads )