This afternoon I released a minor update to WordPress Google Form. This update, v0.57 addresses a bug which prevented translation of the “What is” phrase used for CAPTCHA support. It also includes updated language support files which were not updated in v0.56.
You can find the update in the WordPress Plugin Repository or on your Dashboard as an update.
This evening I released a minor update to Email Users. This update, v4.5.1 addresses two feature requests (Post Author Keyword Replacement and Post Excerpt Filtering, removes some debug code, and adds Italian language support.
You can find the update in the WordPress Plugin Repository or on your Dashboard as an update.
This evening I released v0.56 of WordPress Google Form. I have not had any bug reports in about a week and my own usage has looked pretty solid so it was time to push it out.
This release fixes some issues dealing with UTF-8 characters which are common when using non-English versions of Google Forms. It also adds a significant new feature in HTML5 Placeholders. Placeholders are useful for providing your users with hints on what should entered into various fields without setting default values which could then be submitted. A placeholder has the appearance of a value without actually having something that can be POSTed to the form processor.
Placeholders are an advanced topic in that usage requires knowing the name of the input element. I have based Placeholders on the same basic usage model as the Advanced Validation functionality I introduced a few releases back. Locating the name of the input element isn’t difficult but does requiere examining the HTML source. I wrote up a post on Advanced Validation a few weeks ago and there is a good description of how to identify the name of the input element.
You can find this update on your WordPress Dashboard or in the WordPress plugin repository.
I have released beta-4 of WordPress Google Forms. This beta update addresses a problem reported where the settings for the form weren’t being saved correctly (e.g. turning Title on would not appear to be saved).
It turns out that the settings were saved correctly so the form would work as desired however subsequent edits to the form would return all of the settings to the default state which would then be saved unless the author noted they were wrong and set them correctly again.
The logic to pre-populating the current state of the form’s settings was faulty. This beta update fixes this bug.
Google Forms Beta (8807 downloads )This evening I released beta-3 of WordPress Google Form. This release addresses a requested feature to have “pre-populated fields which disappear when clicked“.
My solution to this request was to implement the placeholder attribute for the input tag. This is also much easier than expecting users to decipher the complex URL requirements to pass default values to a form. The difference between a placeholder and a default value is the placeholder value cannot be submitted. In the case of wanting to have something like “email address”, which isn’t a valid email address, in the form field as a “placeholder”, using the placeholder attribute is a better solution. At least I think so.
Placeholder values are defined when the form is added as a Custom Post Type.
Like the custom validation rules, to use placeholders you will need to know the name attribute for the field you are defining a placeholder for. Refer to this post I wrote on Advanced Validation to learn how to identify the field name.
I released beta-2 of WordPress Google Form v0.56 today. This beta release improves the new Transient support by correctly handling transients when running the plugin under WordPress Multi-Site.
Google Forms Beta (8807 downloads )I have not had any additional issues reported against the v4.5.0-beta-2 release of Email-Users so I have released it to the WordPress plugin repository. The update should appear on your Dashboard soon! Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on the beta releases.
I have posted the initial beta version of WordPress Google Form v0.56. This preliminary release has bug fixes to handle UTF-8 characters in from values and also handles the unusual case where a tab character is embedded in the form response value.
The embedded tab issue was particularly tricky to track down as it is (a) it wasn’t obvious since web browsers render tabs as white space and (b) it isn’t easy to actually enter a tab into an HTML form (which is how Google Forms are created). I was able to embed a tab in a form response by pasting some text from Word. It turns out the user that had the problem I was trying to resolve had done the exact same thing.
Handling the tabs turned out to be tricky so initially I thought I thought I might have to simply detect them and display a warning but in the end I was able to find a viable solution.
This beta release also has the first implementation of Transients for the initial rendering of a form. This use case is likely not all that common but came from a user who had four (4) forms on a single page and was seeing timeouts from Google. Caching the initial rendering of the form will help in this situation. Thanks to Camilo Flores for providing a patch which I based the implementation on.
Google Forms Beta (8807 downloads )Sometime in the past few days (as near as I can tell) Google has updated Forms again. This most recent update adds the H5F Javascript library to do required field checking. This functionality is similar to the jQuery Validation plugin solution I included in WordPress Google Form a number of months ago.
This new validation functionality doesn’t appear in all forms, just those created after a certain date. Existing forms do not appear to have this new functionality embedded in it.
So how do I know if I have the new functionality? The most obvious sign is the appearance of the text “This is a required question” underneath the form element.
It is fairly easy to make these messages go away since they are redundant with the plugin functionality.
You can add the following to your Custom CSS (form specific or global):
div.required-message {
display: none;
}
This will hide the messages and the form reverts to looking as it did prior to Google’s latest change.
I will likely include this CSS as part of the default CSS in the next update but I need to do a little more testing first.
The 2nd beta release of Email-Users v4.5.0 is now available. This version fixes one issue with the integration of User Access Manager and the “Send to Group” function.
Email Users Beta (5656 downloads )