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’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:

I’ve just committed v0.12.7 of TDO Mini Forms into WordPress Extend SVN, so it should be available for download shortly from WordPress.org/Extend.

I know I said the next version will be v0.13 with Editing Support, but that’s not to be. This release includes a fix for a pretty critical bug. If you are using a Windows host please upgrade immediately! 

A combination of WordPress legacy implementation, Windows file name and TDOMF could end up attempting to delete you’re hosts harddrive. This sadly lead to a number of users, who were using their personal Windows PCs as development hosts to lose many personal files.

This would happen if you used the Upload Files widget and uploaded files and then attempted to delete the file using the WordPress admin. The file path would be stored by TDOMF in a Custom Field. However, the WordPress internal API (add_post_meta specifically), currently strips back-slashes from all data put in. This was because originally add_post_meta was only used by the admin backend, but is now a wildly used function by plugins and other parts of WordPress. (IMHO it doesn’t make sense that add_post_meta modifies your input data and also this “feature” is not currently documented anywhere). Windows paths uses back slashes as directory separators, however Unix and Linux systems use forward slashes. Therefore file paths in Unix were stored successfully but Windows file paths were corrupted. So when the post was deleted, TDOMF would try to delete the associated files with that post but end up attempting to delete the hard drive because of the corrupted file path. This problem is not specific to any single version of TDOMF, but any version of TDOMF with the Upload Files widget.

Additionally in this release is a fix for the Queuing of Submissions which was broken on the move to WordPress 2.7, a “double-opt-in” feature to Auto Respond Email widget, a necessary update to the core widget class (which may break your existing configuration, so make sure to double check) and a fix to the default Form code for the Form Hacker.

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!

Yep.  A new version for you all. A new permalink widget, integration with Geo Mashup plugin (for all your geo-positioning needs), enhanced user permissions and some 2.7 testing. You should be able to get it shortly from wordpress.org or via the new plugin update system in 2.7.

I won’t be around for Christmass/New Year so they’ll be no support really for bugs and fixes.

My original intention was that the next release of TDO Mini Forms would include post editing. I’m afraid this isn’t going to manifest till the new year. I wanted to do some intial ground work by adding the enhanced user permissions and creating a widget class (which was used to create the two new widgets in this release) first but when I had done that I started to procrastinate just a tiny bit and when I procrastinated, I ended up bug fixed or add the new widgets so I don’t think it was time wasted!

Lots of bugs got fixed: slashes in posts, breaking comments, errors during upload, ’0′ not being accepted in text fields as valid values, slow loading of admin menus when you have too many users, recaptcha not working in AJAX mode and a few more other little things.

The new widget Permalink allows you to let users set a different permalink for the post. This allows you to let users submit links that when a user clicks on the post, they’ll be redirected to the URL. The Geo Mashup integration widget is based on the original hack of hitekhomeless and its something people have been asking for a while now. It seems to work fine on my test setup (but there are some minor display issues if using a heavily customised theme).

Also, I’ve created a Widget class. If you’re not into code don’t worry – if you are, I hope in the new year to write up a very simple tutorial on how to create your own widgets to add some fields to the form and process them after submission. The new widget class really simplifies it.

And yes. TDO-Mini-Forms is compatible with 2.7 and I’ve now updated the info on wordpress.org to reflect this.

So enjoy and have a Merry Christmass.

Don’t forget, this plugin is free, however if you found it useful you can show your appreciation via a small donation, buying me a book or giving this plugin a high rating on wordpress.org!

I’ve been working on the next version of TDO Mini Forms and the first thing I’ve done is make sure that it works with WordPress 2.7. And it does, the only change is some formatting on the admin menus.

Along with the usual bunch of bug fixes, I’ve implemented new form access options. In the next version you’ll be able to control who can access a form by role, specific users and specific capabilities, which should give you more power. I’m next going to be working on trying to enable forms to be used for editing, not just for submitting.

Version 0.12.5 of the my WordPress plugin TDO-Mini-Forms has just been made available. (It may just take a few minutes as I’ve just committed to the WordPress.org SVN).

This version adds four new widgets:

• An Excerpt Widget – allows submitters to supply their own excerpt
• Comments Management Widget – enable/disable comments and pings for posts submitted from this form and even allow users to chose if they wish to enable comments
• ReCaptcha Widget – it’s been asked for so many times. This integrates the ReCaptcha service into your forms to help fight spam
• Subscribe-to-Comments Widget – this widget integrates with the ever-popular Subscribe-to-Comments 2.1 plugin to allow submitters be automatically subscribed to followup comments via email

Also these widgets were updated:

• Category Widget: Include Field enabled and a sort (and sort by) option added
• Tag Widget: Now includes options for default tags, required tags and even disabling user adding tags.

There are a few other little updates which you can check out on the Version Log. I still have quite number of entries in my Work Queue left but I’m planning to move on and look at post editing, the last big big feature. I think now is a good time to do it rather than spend so much effort adding little features and with WordPress 2.6 revision history feature now in full operation, allowing users to edit posts should be a dream.

Don’t forget, this plugin is free, however if you found it useful you can show your appreciation via a small donation or buying me a book!

I have to apologise. When I saw that TDO Mini Forms was working fine in WordPress 2.6, I kind of left it alone since coming back from the holidays. I’ve been spending my coding time on a new theme for thedeadone.net (enough of it is finished that its good enough to use), which isn’t that much with my wife in bed with the flu. However I have been keeping my eye on the support forums and helping out with advice and suggestions. Next week, I’m going get back into it (and let my nearly-finished theme stay as it is).

And there is lots to do! While TDOMF seems to work fine in WP 2.6+ there are a number of issues reported that I haven’t investigated yet and also I recieved some localised files for French from Laurent 3w3t to roll in. I plan to setup a localisation forum where people can upload .po files and I can upload .pot files in advances of big releases.

Anyway, all this to say that next week I plan to get back into active development of TDO Mini Forms!

… because I’m going on holidays!

Unfortunately I’ve heard that WordPress 2.6 will be out very soon and I haven’t prepared for it. I’m aware of the changes but I haven’t setup a 2.6 test bed to do the work. So please be careful about upgrading, as soon as I get back it’ll be one of the first things I look at.

Also in my current work-queue:

• Form Hacker:
  • Form Import/Export and TDOMF Fixes
  • Support for hacking the Error and Validation and Stylesheet
• Excerpt Widget
• Admin Error and Warning messages on some dud Custom Field configurations (such as empty keys or titles, using the same keys across multiple custom fields, etc.)
• Display an Admin warning if Error messages are enabled (with the last release you can enable all PHP errors by a magic combination of options)

BTW If you want to show your appreciation of TDO Mini Forms by just clicking, you can pop over to WordPress.org and give it a good rating!