Category Archives: Plugin

02.24.12
by

WordPress Google Form v0.24 fixes UTF-8 bug

Recently a couple people have reported problems with international (or UTF-8) characters. The UTF-8 characters were not being passed correctly from the form on the WordPress site on to Google. I had planned to look into the problem this coming weekend but a wpGForm user (cablop.net) beat me to it and has provided the fix (thank you very much!).

I have incorporated the fix and tested it and was able to submit a couple Spanish words that have UTF-8 characters. The update should appear on your Dashboard shortly.

02.12.12
by

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.

02.04.12
by

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.

02.02.12
by

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.

01.30.12
by

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!

01.29.12
by

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.

01.28.12
by

wpGForm Bugs in v0.15

I have been alerted to a couple of bugs in the current (v0.15) version of wpGForm that I am working on fixing.

  1. Select boxes do not retain their value when going back on multi-page forms.  I’ve already fixed this problem in my development build.
  2. Check boxes are not passing their values correctly.
  3. Sometimes Radio buttons do not retain their values when going back on multi-page forms.

This third item is proving difficult to track down. It is odd that some questions with radio buttons work fine going back and forth between pages but others do not.  If I can fix the check boxes this morning I will likely release an update that addresses the first two bugs and keep working on the third problem.

01.26.12
by

Why Doesn’t My Form Render?

I typically get asked questions several times a week from people trying to use my WordPress Google Form plugin.   The most common problem I see is incorrect shortcode syntax which isn’t real obvious.  If you use the visual editor (which I do) when composing a post of page which includes the gform shortcode, pasting the URL for the Google Form will frequently include the pasted text as a link.  Take a look at these two images.

 

At first glance the text appears the same and there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with the shortcode syntax. However, the first one will not render because it has a link embedded in it.  As I said – not real obvious but leaving the link in will result in an error when trying to render the form.

Removing the link is easy, simply click anywhere within the link and use the Remove Link icon (broken chain) and you’ll end up with shortcode syntax similar to what you see in the second image.

01.17.12
by

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.

01.17.12
by

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.