WordPress Google Form bug with required fields

Google forms allow fields to be designated as required.  When running the form using the standard Google URL, the form will be validated and presented back to the user if any of the required fields are not entered.  There is an issue (aka bug) with required fields in the current version of the plugin.

If a user submits a form that is embedded in WordPress using the plugin, because there are missing fields the form processing does not complete.  There is no indication for the user that something is wrong, the form is simply presented again without any of the fields having data in them.

To resolve this I am looking at doing form validation on the client side using a jQuery plugin.  Hopefully I will have this resolved fairly quickly as I need this to work correctly for my own project.  My testing didn’t take into account a user not completely the form correctly.  Oops.  This bug affects all versions of WordPress Google Form up to and including v0.9.

Stay tuned.

wpGForm plugin updated to v0.8

Over the past 24 hours I have committed a number of changes to my wpGFrom plugin.  The WordPress auto update process sometimes takes a little while to recognize a new version is out there but v0.8 should appear fairly soon.  I actually updated it a couple times so you may have seen v0.6 and/or v0.7 show up as well.

This update addresses two bugs (the spurious output of CSS and embedded Javascript) and also adds some new features.  Check out the Changelong on the WordPress plugin repository for more details.  I’ve been using the plugin for one of my own projects and to the best of my knowledge, it is working ok.  If I don’t run into anything else in the next week or two, I’ll bump the version to 1.0 and call it ready.

Child theme or not? That is the question …

Off and on over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a Thematic child theme.  I’ve always had a hesitation with child themes in that you need the parent theme in order for the child theme to work.  Duh.  While it may be pretty obvious to anyone who is familiar with WordPress, it isn’t so for the casual user.

When I was working with Sandbox I figured out a way to essentially build a child theme while ensuring that the parent theme dependency wasn’t an issue by including all of the Sandbox code  using a SVN external reference to Sandbox and some other tricks to include the code.  It worked well and I was able to distribute my themes without concern as to whether or not Sandbox was installed.  It simply didn’t matter.

I was not planning to do that with the Thematic child theme I am working on right now but am having second thoughts.  It turns out that the version of Thematic that I need (0.9.8) is not the version which is in the WordPress Theme Repository and I have no idea when this will change.

If I got the SVN external route again I can ensure that my child theme will work with a known revision of Thematic.  However, it is a fundamental shift in my approach and I don’t know if it will work the same way I did it with Sandbox.  Decisions, decisions.

It looks like there have been some recent commits to the Thematic SVN repository so maybe it will be updated and released soon.  That would help address my dilemma.

wpGForm v0.5 fixes Settings page bug

I have just committed v0.5 of the WordPress Google Form plugin.  It addresses the problem with the Tabs on the Settings page not working correctly.  It turns out that I had a couple of problems which were masked by the theme I was using.  I have moved my development environment back to the stock Twenty-Eleven theme and turned off all other plugins.

By doing this I determined that the jQuery UI libraries I expected to be loaded, were in fact, not loaded at all.  They were being loaded by the theme!  Once I got the libraries loaded correctly the Tabs started working but they didn’t have the proper styling.  WordPress doesn’t appear to include the jQuery UI CSS so I ended up loading it from Google’s CDN.

Everything seems to be working correctly now, v0.5 should appear as an update shortly if it hasn’t already.

 

WordPress Google Form Settings Bug

The WordPress Google Forms settings page makes use of tabs to show information about the plugin and set its options.  It appears that the theme I was using, which I am in the process developing, is the culprit.  It loads some new jQuery functionality from Google’s API that apparently allowed the tabs to work as I expected.  I am not sure yet why the builtin WordPress jQuery functionality isn’t working correctly as I expect it should.

Now that I know where the problem is, I think it should be pretty straight forward to fix it.

WordPress Google Form Plugin

I’ve spent some time over the last couple of days cleaning up the WordPress Google Form plugin I’ve been working on and getting it added to the WordPress plugin repository.  I am happy report that I think I have a stable version (v0.4) finally available that people can play with.

I’ve added a Sample Form and the corresponding Sample Results collected from form submissions if  you are interested in seeing what the plugin looks like in action.

This plugin resulted from a need to collect data in a simple manner that could be managed in a spreadsheet.  Google Docs provides an easy to use spreadsheet that be used to store the data.  Google Forms provides a mechanism to design a form that can add data to the spreadsheet.  The WordPress Google Form plugin allows the form to be added to a WordPress site and maintain the look and feel of the active theme.

Note:  It looks like I didn’t flush out all of the bugs – the tabs on the Settings page are not working correctly!

WordPress Google Form Plugin

For the past couple of days I have been working on a new WordPress plugin I am calling WordPress Google Form.  This morning I received the approval for adding it to the WordPress plugin repository so I will be doing that over the next couple of days.  I spent much of the last two days on an airplane so the plugin is currently in a state where I have it modified to work offline but I’ve done enough online testing that I am pretty confident I have something working.

My interest in Google Forms stems from the work I am doing on a site for our Middle School.  We have a need to collect information in the form of Booster Club memberships and while there are a number of Membership type plugins, none of them really do what I want.  Ultimately what we need is a spreadsheet of names, addresses, and phone numbers and Google Docs will work well for that.  Putting a Google Form on the front end will allow us to capture the data online.

I thought integrating the Google Form with our WordPress site would be pretty simple, Google offers the ability to embed a form using an IFRAME.  Unfortunately the ability to style the form is pretty limited and the Confirmation page even less so.

I have been using the Google Inline Spreadsheet Viewer plugin to display the data from our Google spreadsheets, I was somewhat surprised to find that there doesn’t seem to be anything similar for Google Forms.  So I decided to write one.  Borrowing some ideas from the Google Inline Spreadsheet Viewer plugin, I have created a plugin that defines the shortcode gform.  The gform shortcode takes a Google Forms URL and extracts the FORM body content, cleans it up, and outputs it for WordPress posts, pages, and widgets.

There are a number of attributes that can optionally control the output, the most significant is the confirmation page which can redirect to a page within the WordPress site instead of the default Google conformation page.

More details to follow soon and I hope to have an example up and running later today.

Moving forward with Thematic

I haven’t had much time to work on any of my theme projects but in the last week or so I’ve been trying spend some free cycles on something I am called “Middle School – High School Boosters Club” theme.

My wife is the president of our Middle School Boosters Club this year and much like the swim team was years ago when I got involved, the Boosters Club has no web presence and just about everything is done on paper.  Bleh.  She has asked me to build a web site for the Boosters Club so I am  using it as an opportunity to choose a new theme framework (I’ve settled on Thematic) and see how much stuff I can leverage from Google Apps to build them a solution that doesn’t require me to babysit it all the time. We’ll see how that goes!

As I noted in a prior post, the Wicked WordPress Themes book has been a good resource to get me going with Thematic.  I also found a Thematic Child Theme called Byty which caught my eye and I decided I wanted something similar.  The downside of Byty is a lot of the nice gradient effects have been achieved with images as opposed to CSS.  That is understandable as gradients were not available until CSS3.  However, I want whatever I build to be fairly modern so I’ve decided to go down the CSS3 route.

I am specifically not building a theme for our school but instead and building one which can be tailored for any school by selecting a color scheme.  We’ll see how well I accomplish that!  These are some of the requirements that I am working against which I suspect would be similar for any other school boosters club that may want a web site.

  1. Online Store with PayPal/Credit Card Payments
  2. Support for Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages
  3. Color schemes
  4. Custom Logo(s)
  5. Calendar(s) for game and practice schedules
  6. Sport specific pages featuring just the posts relevant to that sport

Since Google Calendar is dead simple to use and with so many people using Gmail already, it seemed like the logical choice to base the calendar solution on.  Google Apps is free for organizations like a boosters club to  use to registering our domain with Google Apps was the first thing I did.  This also makes it easy to create e-mail accounts for the various people associated with the club (president, secretary, etc.) so they can perform their task without polluting their personal email.

Once Google Apps was configured, I created a Calendar for each of the sports we will support (Football, Volleyball, Boys and Girls Soccer, Softball, Boys and Girls Basketball, etc.).  These calendars can be viewed separately or combined making it easy to view the whole calendar or just the calendar for a specific sport.  Even better, WordPress supports Google Calendar vias oEmbed turning a Google Calendar URL into a Gcal short code!  About the only downside I have found so far is it is very hard to style the Google Calendar, I’d really like the light blue Google uses to be a different color to match the rest of the site but I will live with it based on how easy managing the calendar will be!

I’ve decided to use Simple Twitter Connect and Simple Facebook Connect, both from Otto, for Twitter and Facebook integration.  I’ve used them before so they were familiar to me.  Based on the recommendation from the Wicked WordPress  Themes, I also tried AddThis but it is a  bit more invasive than I want so I went back to SFC and STC.

For an online shop, I am going with eShop which is a very simple shopping cart plugin.  Since we’re selling just a few items (e.g. t-shirts, sweatshirts, etc.), we don’t need anything complex and eShop looks like it will do what we need.

The site isn’t online yet so there isn’t anything to see but hopefully I will have a demo up and running fairly soon.  I need to do some more CSS work and get the custom page loops I want.  I am impressed with how easy Thematic has been to work with.

phpHtmlLib v2.6.2.3545 available

Update:  Bad link fixed!  2/21/2011

An update to the phpHtmlLib plugin which wp-SwimTeam depends on is now available.  This update addresses a number of issues found running against PHP 5.3.5, the latest release of PHP.  There are number of changes between PHP 5.2.x and 5.3.x which were exposed and have been addressed.  This update is ABSOLUTELY necessary for anyone running on a server which has PHP 5.3.x installed.

wp-SwimTeam plugin – updated 2/20/2011 @ 18:11
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A new project?

Recently I have been working on a new Swim Team related project which at some point I will likely integrate into wp-SwimTeam but for now, it is a standalone application.  Pretty regularly I receive e-mail from people who want to post their meet results online in some form or fashion.  Most of the time these results come from Hy-tek in the form of a ZIP file or a CL2 file.

Generating or posting a static web page with some results on it is pretty straight forward and most swim software can do this in some form or another.  Storing the results in a database and presenting them as part of a web site isn’t something readily available as near as I can tell.  It would be nice to be able to upload a season’s worth of results and allow swimmers and parents to review their times and see the trends.  This is basically what I am working on.

At this point I can import a SDIF meet results file and extract the meet data from it.  I have some other infrastructure complete as well and will begin working on extracting and processing all of the result records in the next day or two.

I’ve based this project on two external PHP libraries.  I am using  the 2.x thread of phpHtmlLib, which I also use for wp-SwimTeam and ADODB.  This is my first time using ADODB and so far, there haven’t been any issues.  I decided to use it because I needed a database abstraction layer and phpHtmlLib has a ADODB data source widget which makes it very easy to present data to a user.