A guy called Court has put together a video tutorial and article on using TDO Mini Forms, my free Wordpress plugin.

The video is pretty good too as it shows you how to create a submission form and an edit form. I think I may be adding a link to this on the FAQ!

As a footnote to the video, the latest version 0.13.7 does include Custom Field editing and the compare view for edit posts is now working.

Also check out his site for indie musicians called indilean that uses TDO Mini Forms too.

A new release of TDO Mini Forms should be available very shortly from wordpress.org. Several people reported that upgrading to 0.13.6 resulted in a blank page appearing for their wordpress site. This release is specifically to fix that.

I’m sorry about this, but it didn’t appear on my test server before release.

It’s been a while since the previous release and each release seems to take longer and longer before it’s ready, but it was officially released on Wordpress.org Extend yesterday, so you should be able to automatically update today.

The big change in this release is that you can now created Edit forms that allow you to modify Custom Fields as text areas, fields, checkbox or a select list. It took a while to do because I had to refactor the Custom Field widget into the new class I designed for widgets. The power of this feature should be obvious for any sort of CMS style use of Wordpress as Custom Fields are incredible powerful. The plugin also keeps a history of Custom Field changes made using the plugin and you can compare between versions, something Wordpress doesn’t do itself. So you can rollback edits as required (and also moderate incoming edits).

I also refactored out all the individual field types so that fixes and features for text areas, for example, can be shared among all widgets. For a start, text fields can be used to take an email, a url or a number. I haven’t gotten around to a date/time combination yet, but it’s certainly possible.

I’ve also integrated some code improvements and hope to continue to try and improve the code base into the future. I’ve improved the AJAX code that is used for forms, hopefully preventing people from double posts (a problem that has cropped up a lot recently for people posting to the forum). The plugin also only loads the admin pages and functions only if someone with admin rights is logged in.

You can check the changelog for a full list of changes (though some minor improvements seemed to have not gotten onto the list, sorry about that).

Again, and it seems to be a recurring thing, I have to apologies that I haven’t got through to every support request on the forum. I do my best, but I really only have a few hours a week to work on TDO Mini Forms and my time gets divided then between actually implementing features or improvements or going through the forum (and I often side on working with the code instead). I know people have offered to pay for improvements, but I cannot currently commit to deadlines as I’m working a full time job at the same time.

Please keep in mind that this plugin is free and any support I do manage to provide is also free. If you found it useful you can show your appreciation via a small donation or buying me a book!

So I’m going on holidays tomorrow, for a goodly period of time (but not too long). Can’t wait to get out of here and stop worrying about the recession, work, weather and everything else for a little bit.

I’m looking forward to it, not least because it’s time with my family but also because it’s time I get to indulge my creative hobbies, normally my drawing, writing and coding. No deadlines, no plans. In fact I finished off my One Month Fudge Adventure Challenge early because having a deadline was definitely focusing me but to the exclusion of all my other creative interests. Of course my family takes first place in practically everything (and I can’t wait to see my daughter again as she went ahead to spend a week or two with her French granny), but there generally enough time to get into stuff I don’t do at home.

I’m bringing my trusty/quirky 10-years-old laptop with me, but I won’t have internet access or even local TV. That’s fine for me. I’ll have a local webserver installed, so if I feel like it, I may work on TDO-Mini-Forms Wordpress plugin (not bug fixes though, but additional features and refactoring). I’ll have my sketchpad, pencils, paints and bright clear weather to work by. I already have a number of projects I’d love to attempt. And my old laptop with OpenOffice and an install of Bazaar allows me to write away with few worries (and I have a score of ideas and projects just waiting to be cracked open). I’ll even have the time to read tens of books, compared to the measly one or two books every few months I do the rest of the year.

I’ve also been recently getting into twitter (@thedeadone) and using it quite a bit, more so then I blog. But I’ve found I can twitter from my underpowered non-iPhone mobile so I may be sending some tweets and pics from my holidays. I’ve even setup my Wordpress blog (so that I can post from my phone too (thanks to a cool plugin called postie), so possible expect some short updates and photos here.

See you in a while!

Yep. 0.13.2 is out today. See the (new and improved wordpress 2.8) changelog for details of whats in this release.

I have to apologise for my lack of responses on the numerous support requests. I’m about a month behind but I will get through them, so hang on! Life, work and my other hobby projects are all overloaded these days.

You can grab the latest version of tdo-mini-forms from Wordpress.org right now!

I’m sure within minutes the internet will collapse but I’ve finally got it done. v0.13 adds the ability to edit posts and has improved moderation screen. I say that with a big sigh because there is still a lot to do to finish off the backend, improve the post editing and finally tackle the long list of bugs that has accumulated, but with this version at least you can start to play with editing.

Enjoy! And any issues report them to the support forums or even try out twitter (hashtag #tdomf).

Please keep in mind that this plugin is free and any support I provide is also free. If you found it useful you can show your appreciation via a small donation or buying me a book!

I’ve been testing TDO Mini Forms (a Wordpress plugin) on a live server for a few days now. Spam protection seems to work, which is great. I only have two things left to do before I do an official release: update the readme.txt and update the ReCapatcha widget to work with the editing form.

But to get people going, you can download a beta now from the development branch.

I’ve also been sucked into twitter! @thedeadone – I will be “tweeting” (is that the right verb?) using the hashtag #tdomf anything relevant to TDO Mini Forms. (‘tdomf’ is the tag I’ve always used to tag stuff relevant to TDO Mini Forms online).

Any comments and feedback welcome, but don’t expect major changes before the next release (which should be very soon!). Thank you.

Please keep in mind that this plugin is free and any support I provide is also free. If you found it useful you can show your appreciation via a small donation or buying me a book!

I’m making good progress on the next release of TDO Mini Forms. I’ve managed to clear out much of my “TODO” list and I’m only left with updating widgets before I move to a live test server. On the live test server I’ll be testing and finishing admin notifications and akismet spam integration for the editing feature. More screenshots after the “more” link!

On a short side-note, it seems that I’m 115th top Wordpress Plugin Author, thanks to the popularity of TDO Mini Forms! Anyway…

I’m starting to get excited about getting this version out and seeing what people think. There is a lot still left to finish though. The first drop of the editing feature is going to be a little limited in some places. Only a subset of widgets will be supported, specifically only Content, Who Am I, Image Captcha, I Agree, Append to Post Content, 1 Question Captcha and Text will work on an Editing Form. I will continue to update and add existing widgets to the Editing Form in the future though, but I thought it better to get the form out there with enough to make it workable.

The big limitation though is on the moderation of user edits. Currently within the plugin, there is very little I can do to modify how the revisions are presented in the standard Wordpress UI. I think in the future I’ll be adding a version of the revision page to TDO Mini Forms that will give me more control and free up the way things work. Right now, when a post has a unapproved edit (or an edit flagged as spam), the post is locked down. No other edits can occur. The current revision page for posts doesn’t allow me to add information about revisions to indicate which are spam or unapproved. I’d like to provide the option to allow unlocked editing, but both the spam options and revision options need to be improved. A task for future versions.

And I’ve only started to update the admin backend to make it more Wordpress 2.7-like (and I hope I’m finished before Wordpress 2.8 is out!) and I have a lot of ideas to improvement and many good suggestions from the forums.

But I want the subsequent releases to be more about bug fixes than anything else. I’ve neglected a lot of bug fixing in lieu of getting this editing-feature done. It has taken me, on occasion, a month to get through the requests on the forum! Also, I suspect, the editing forms will introduce a whole new plethora of bugs, which simple did not crop up in my testing.

So all things not withstanding, a release should be coming soon. And to keep your appetite wet, here are some more screen-shots for you.

I’ve been toiling away on TDO Mini Forms for a while, but I’m finding it hard to get a big stretch of time to work on it. So work is done in bits and pieces and I’ve had to priorities what work is done. Right now I have a long list of bugs and other features to be implemented because of being concentrating on getting Post (and Page) editing implemented.

It’s still a long way to go, however the core work is done. I can create forms that allow you edit posts and to moderate edits. It should work with Akismet, much like submissions do, but I haven’t yet tested that part of the code. The Form Options screen has been updated and the Moderation screen is much more Wordpress 2.7 now. Still there is a lot of work to do and even when I have it basically finished (and release it), I’ll still have tons more to do. The admin UI is still in a transitionally design between Wordpress 2.5 and 2.7 look and feel and most of the other widgets will incrementally get added to the editing feature.

However, to wet your appetite, here are some screen shots of the moderation screen and edit form:

So I’m finally getting over being poorly last week, but I’m finding I’m not up to full speed yet. I’m quite tired from the run of antibiotics. Last night, after the kids were in bed, I planned to do some writing (on Lost Heroes) and some painting (bought some new watercolours) but instead, all I could do was zombie out in front of the TV for half an hour before I crawled up to bed.

Today has turned out to be a frustrating one. Work was going fine till after lunch, when my PC started to act weird. It’s a new PC that I’ve just got up to spec with all the software I need and have been using fine for two weeks. So I reboot and it won’t start – can’t find “boot device”. As it turns out my hard drive is fecked. So the whole afternoon is lost, I couldn’t even go and do something else. I’ve lost some stuff, nothing critical, but I have lost some work on TDO Mini Forms which I hadn’t been backing up. 

Anyway, chin up. I’ll get a new harddrive tomorrow, spend the rest of the day re-installing all the software I need and trying to recover as much data as I can and just getting on with it.