I always thought if there was a decent alternative to my wordpress plugin TDO Mini Forms, that I would properly retire the plugin. Well it seems there may be: Gravity Forms. As it says on the website: “the WordPress form management plugin you’ve been waiting for”. The catch? You have to pay for it.
And for that reason I haven’t tried it so I can’t comment on in comparison to TDO Mini Forms, but certainly it looks more polished and contains all sorts of features I never added to TDO Mini Forms. Yet because you have to pay, you get access to proper support, something I’ve struggle to provide (as it’s simply not fun).
A number of commenters on my post about TDO Mini Forms hiatus suggested I should turn it into a paid plugin and that they’d be willing to pay for it. Well I think Gravity Forms have beaten me to the punch there, though I never had the drive to try and make money from TDO Mini Forms at all.
I did say:
…if you’re building a professional website using WordPress and require some special user interface that hides the backend UI, it’s great to mock something up with TDO Mini Forms. But I can’t help but think, it would be better to build your own custom version. TDO Mini Forms is incredibly flexible, but it can’t do everything. And the more complex it gets, the more bug prone it becomes and harder to support and… well it also suffers the fickleness of an author that isn’t under contract to support it long term either. Just saying, it’s not as I’m being paid.
Maybe Gravity Forms is your answer if that paragraph hits home.
Of course, the existence of Gravity Forms does allow me to think, perhaps, I could strip back a lot of the “advanced” features, such as image upload, and just make a simple decent post submit/edit form with moderation. Which is what it should have been all along, rather than the sprawling, monstrous, hacky mess of code and features it is now.
So I won a competition from dicecreator to get my own custom dice, which rocks. So I spent an afternoon working on the design. I’m sure you’ve seen my the Cthulhu-inspired image on the front of this webpage (and it doubles as my twitter icon) but if not, here it is again.
I thought this might make a cool face on one of the dice, so I went about re-working it a bit, using my trusty lightbox. I’m sure I could have done the re-work on the computer exclusively but I still like to use pencil and pens. It’s more satisfying somehow, at least for me.
I removed the background, filled in his wings which highlighted the tentacles much better. I was keeping in mind how it would look on a small dice.
I wanted “Fudge Dice”. Fudge dice has two faces with plus “+”, two with minus “-” and the final two blank. Keeping the Cthulhu theme, the minus and plus have to be tentacles!
I cheated though, I drew one half of a tentacle and then using my lightbox built up a minus and plus.
But, I won two customised dice and didn’t want to waste the opportunity with just one design! Using some themes from stuff I did for Lost Heroes RPG and the same technique as the tentacles, I came up with theses:
Now with my two designs, I sent them.
And I got the results in my hand right now:
I think they look rather cool myself!
(I’ll write up my initial impressions in another post)
TDO Mini Forms is one of the best plugins for WordPress to allow visitors or users to publish posts and upload files without having to access the admin area. You can select categories for the post, add tags, title, content, etc. However, even after WordPress introduced UIs for custom taxonomies in version 2.8, TDO Mini Forms (or tdomf for short) won’t allow you to select custom taxonomies. In this post you will find how to modify the categories widget for TDOMF to enable custom taxonomies.
I came across dicecreator via twitter. He makes these exceptional custom dice for gaming such as these amazing Fudge dice (image on the right). And during some testing of his equipment he decided to use my twitter icon as a test for some dice:
Which, to use the American vernacular, is awesome!
So now I get to design my own dice, one black and one red both six-sided. My first thought was to use some of the “icons” I created for Lost Heroes, but these might be too complicated to fit nicely on a dice. Also, they wouldn’t be very practical in a game.
So my thinking turned to Fudge dice, perhaps with one of the “+” symbols is replaced, one would be the Lost Heroes main icon and on the other dice, a slightly modified version of my twitter icon. The actual + and – symbols I’d customise too, thinking for one a stark pointy sword shapes and for the other tentacle like. Hopefully over the next few days I’ll get down to do some drawing and see what comes out.
I’ll post the results here anyway. Also means I need to game in the next while!
Got to the bottom of not being able to drag and drop in my TDO Mini Forms plugin after WordPress 3.0 upgrade. The fix will take a bit of time to do as it requires a little re-engineering of the Create Forms screen.
The problem occurred because with WordPress 3.0, they also updated their jQuery libraries and re-engineered how you load them. To be honest, I didn’t expect a jQuery update would break existing jQuery-based code, but sadly it’s nothing more than I would expect.
I’ll get a proper fix out for it something this week.
I’ve just spent a good hour updating all my sites to the latest drop of WordPress 3.0 (I’m amazing I’m running so many, anyway…). As far as I can tell TDO Mini Forms is still mostly working okay. Certainly you can upgrade right now if you’re security conscious. Submitting post and previewing seems to be okay. But the drag/drop in the form editor is broken, so you can’t edit or create new forms. I’ll see over the next week if I can fix it. Please feel free to log any issues about upgrading here and I’ll see what I can get through.
If you notice anything else that doesn’t work after upgrade, feel free to drop a comment here. I don’t have the bandwidth to test every feature, so I’m sure some minor feature or corner issue may also break.
Even finding time to write this blog post is problematic, having to push it into the few spare minutes during my lunch break. I simply have not found the time to work on TDO Mini Forms. Well that’s not entirely true, I haven’t found time and motivation this last six months.
Part of the problem is that I implemented TDO Mini Forms for fun, a neat little plugin for WordPress I could use on some web projects (all dead now by the way). Then it was driven by my love of coding and the small crowd of users. But I changed projects in work several months back and could no longer slip the time in to bash away at some code for myself, at least during the daylight hours and now there is a mountain of support requests on the forums that I can’t even comprehend getting through and a slow disconnect between what I enjoyed about it and what I wanted to enjoy about it.
Essentially, it’s not fun any more. It’s bug fixes, RTFM and maintaince upgrades (with WordPress 3.0 is coming and that’s like a big stomping unstoppable giant, which I fully expect to splat my plugins…) it becomes daunting. I’ve added too many features (that can do wonderful things), and people either complain about them (“it’s too complex”) or demand more (“editable image uploads ftw!”). The whole code base of TDO Mini Forms evolved chaotically and the idea of re-writing (and having to maintain some degree of backwards compatibility) it’s quite off-putting.
And then I’m working on another creative project that I’m genuinely motivated about, but isn’t software. And when I have free time, I dive into this project, because I want to, not because I have to.
It might be more interesting if I was getting more out of it, say I was a web-developer (I’m not, I’m embedded engineer) and it was promoting my career or getting my clients, I was a big wordpress-advocate and people were coming to my blog to hear the cool things I say (I don’t have much cool things to say, unless you like tabletop roleplaying…), I was making enough money from donations I could afford to get a new gadget every once in a while or it was powering a big project I loved, but it’s not.
So I’m not sure where that leaves TDO Mini Forms. I think probably it’s been on an unofficial hiatus for the last while already. I don’t want to dump it, but I’m not sure of when I’ll get back to it. I have been thinking about it a lot, but not working on it. (I may write up those thoughts in a future blog post).
One thing I will say, if you’re building a professional website using WordPress and require some special user interface that hides the backend UI, it’s great to mock something up with TDO Mini Forms. But I can’t help but think, it would be better to build your own custom version. TDO Mini Forms is incredibly flexible, but it can’t do everything. And the more complex it gets, the more bug prone it becomes and hard to support and… well it also suffers the fickleness of an author that isn’t under contract to support it long term either. Just saying, it’s not as I’m being paid.
I have to send out a big thanks to all the people who have donated to the plugin. I really do appreciate it and it’s why I went so far with it. Thanks for listening.
However, I did come across this plugin for WordPress: Quick Post. It didn’t install properly when I tried it, but I played with it and bit and got it to work. What it does is add a little “Bookmarklet” (works in Chrome and Firefox at least) which you can click on when you’re on a webpage and it’ll pop up a window with some details of the page you’re on already embedded in the post. What is nice about it, is that you can select a portion of the page, click the bookmarklet, and it’ll pop up a post with that text in it. It can also embed videos and images.
How does this solve my problem? I can’t get Google Reader to automatically create a draft post. But that’s not a big deal. I don’t want to be sharing loads of stuff here, so doing a little bit of manual work is fine. I just go to the link, select a summary or an image and I can use Quick Post to generate an entry. I’ll have to copy over my comment, but that’s fine. It forces me to write a blog post instead of just dumping a link compared to say doing it on Facebook or Twitter.
I did some digging, planning on forwarding my fixes to the author, and found that it is no longer supported! Not only that, it’s already supported in WordPress 2.6 (the latest version is 2.9). It seems if you go under the Tools menu, you’ll find a link called “Press It”, which you can drag to your Browser’s bookmarks. This little bookmarklet does something similar to Quick Post. Go to a webpage, select the text from the page, click the bookmarklet and you get a simple post screen with the link and title plus your summary. It’s pretty funky.
My one complaint is that if you want to use an image from a website, it only allows you to use the URL as the image (i.e. hotlinking). It doesn’t automatically download the image, which would make it the ultimate solution.
So there you go, that’s my wordpress tip for the month. Now you shouldn’t have any excuse for automated regurgitated content.
I know of plugins that can take your Google Reader Shared Items and automatically generate a post for you. (I was using this one and it’s quite good). This is nice, but doesn’t actually make a great post.
My plan is to post some or occasional items from my Google Reader shared items. I want to control the flow and only post those few that I think people may like (who see my blog).
