WordPress Google Form v0.23

This evening I released v0.23 of my WordPress Google Form plugin. This update fixes a situation where CSS declarations were output as plain text as part of the form. I believe the cause of this was due to an appearance theme for the form being specified in the Google Form Designer. The update should roll out via the WordPress Dashboard Update failrly soon.

WordPress Google Form update – v0.22

Yesterday I received a report from someone using WordPress Google Form that their checkboxes weren’t working. This was very confusing to me because last weekend I spent a bunch of time fixing and testing the checkbox problem.

It turns out the jQuery script which fixes the checkboxes to work with PHP was never running. Why wasn’t it running? Because jQuery wasn’t ever loaded. Why wasn’t jQuery loaded? Because wpGForm never loaded it! It turned out the website which reported the problem was using a theme that doesn’t use jQuery and therefore never loaded it.

Well the WordPress Google Form plugin, which needs jQuery, didn’t load it either. I (and I can only assume other people) was never seeing a problem because either the theme or another plugin was loading jQuery.

The v0.22 update corrects this problem which was somewhat of a corner case, but a problem none the less.

WordPress Google Form minor update – v0.21

This morning I have updated WordPress Google Form and fixed a number of documentation problems and added one minor new feature.  While I am not a big fan of Javascript Alerts, I had a request to allow a message to be displayed upon successful form submission.  I have added a new parameter (alert=’message’) to the gform short code to enable this new functionality.

[gform form='https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dEYwbGNYVG9TRUhXellMaDBuZ1RQTHc6MQ#gid=0' confirm='http://localhost/?page_id=435' alert='You da man!']

The new release should appear in the WordPress repository immediately and as Dashboard update fairly soon.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

WordPress Google Form v0.12 is out

Yesterday I committed and tagged the v0.12 release of my WordPress Google Form plugin.  It is available from the WordPress plugin repository.  The main feature of this release is support for multi-page Google Forms.  The changes made to support multi-page forms should also enable use of fields that have optional answers.

There is still some leftover code from the old validation process that I was reluctant to completely remove until I know for sure this new architecture is working in more use cases than I have to test with.  There will likely be another update that is nothing more than a code clean up in a couple weeks unless someone reports a problem.

wpGForm v0.11 beta

I am currently running a beta version of wpGForm v0.11 here on my site.  The big change for this version if the support for multi-page Google Forms.  You can see how they work using my Sample Multi-Page Google Form.

I am looking for some people to test this version and provide feedback.  If you can check it out and provide some feedback I’d really appreciate it.  There are quite a few changes in this version due to the rearchitecture required to support multi-page forms.  There shouldn’t be any changes to what is actually rendered for the user.

This version also fixes the confirmation page bug that has been present when a custom confirmation page wasn’t specified.  The behavior of the custom confirmation page is slightly different too in this version.

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