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Version 0.12.5 includes integration with the reCapatcha captcha service, integration with the Subscribe-to-Plugins 2.1 plugin (allow submitters to subscribe to followup comments automatically), Comments management widget (allows you to set comments and ping status for forms and/or allow users chose if they want to allow comments), Excerpt Widget and even more bug fixes

TDO Mini Forms has been used to turn Wordpress into a Forum and a Contact Manager!

This plugin allows you to add a form to your website that allows non-registered users and/or subscribers (configurable) to submit posts. The posts are kept in “draft” until an admin can publish them (also configurable).

The plugin provides an extensive moderation view so administrators and editors can see posts awaiting approval and publish or delete them. Administrators can also ban specific users and IPs from using the form. Administrators can also “Trust” specific users. This means that when they use the form, their posts are automatically published. This does not give them any other rights or permissions using the Wordpress software, it only affects usage of the form. This applies to user and IP bans as well. There is even an option to automatically trust users after so many approved submissions. (It should be noted that submissions from users that can already publish using the normal Wordpress UI, will be automatically published.)

Administrators can configure the form using drag and drop “widgets”. They are based on the same model as Wordpress’ built-in Theme widgets and it is possible to write your own. With 0.7, more options are available and it is now much easier to integrate with your theme. You don’t even need to modify your theme any more to display submitter information!

Registered users have access to a “Your Submissions” page which lists their current submissions awaiting approval and links to their approved submissions.

• Demo Site

Features

• Integration with Subcribe-to-Comments 2.1 plugin
• Integration with Akismet and reCaptcha to prevent Spam
• Highly customisable: Create your form using a Widget interface.
• Create as many forms as you like.
• Put a form in your sidebar using a widget for your Theme.
• Submit pages instead of posts.
• Simple Question and/or Image Captcha.
• Posting Policy.
• Add Custom Fields to your Form.
• QuickTags support for Forms.
• Upload Files and can be attached to posts. Uses Wordpress’ core to create thumbnails if applicable.
• Submitters can be notified if post approved or rejected.
• Allow users to select category and tags.
• Ban users and IPs.
• Control what roles can access the form.
• Can automatically create a page with form for you.
• Can automatically modified author template tag with info about submitter.
• Can, optionally, automatically allow submissions to be published.
• Throttle number of submissions by user and/or IP
• Optionally Queue published posts
• Numerous widgets for your theme, including a list of the top submitters
• And many more…

Version 0.12 introduces the Form Hacker which allows admins the power to modify the form code from within the plugin as opposed to hacking the plugin source code. Nearly all messages to the user are configurable now.

Version 0.11 provides integration with Akismet, Submission Throttling, Import and Export of Form settings, Queuing Approved Post, Top Submitter theme widget and numerous bug fixes!

For Installation, Screenshots, FAQ, Full Version History and Known Bugs, please check the included readme.txt or the Wordpress.org page for the plugin.

For Support (and live demo), please see the Forums.

Version Info: v0.12.5: 20th October 2008

• A “link” to the thumbnail is stored on the post using TDOMF_KEY_DOWNLOAD_THUMBURI key.
• Excerpt Widget
• Comments Management Widget
• Categories Include Field enabled (was accidently left disabled in previous release)
• Category Widget now has a Order by and Order options
• Recaptcha Widget
• Warning displayed if “I Agree” text is not modified
• Integration with Subscibe to Comments plugin via “Subscribe to Comments” widget
• Publish Now button
• Instead of notifying specific roles that a submission is requiring moderation, you can now specify an email list
• Tags Widget now has options for default tags, required and to disable user adding tags

It works by treating Categories as Forums and treating Posts with omments as Topics. I’ve also built in a number of features to the theme:

• Lists Posts by date of last comment (instead of published date) (included as a page template)
• Unread topics are highlighted and can be used to filter posts list (included as a page template)
• A hierarchical Forum list (included as a page template)
• AJAX Comment Preview (can be turned off)
• Comment QuickTags (can be turned off)
• Forum-looking Layout
• Pages and Categories can be used as Tabs (configurable)
• RSS 2.0 Feed of forum posts (can optionally be included in the theme or replace the main post RSS feed link)

I also did some special integration with two popular plugins:

• Filosofo’s WordPress Gravatar Plugin so that users automatically have user-icons thanks to Gravatars.
• Paged Comments. With Paged comments, I’ve done quite a bit of integration. If you enable this plugin with the theme, essentially the blog post (which is the first post in a topic) appears only on the first page of comments, not on every page of comments as if it was a blog. And it handles ascending and descending order too.

Why use Wordpress as a Forum instead of a Blogging Platform? Because Wordpress is pretty darn powerful and it’s more like a full CMS geared towards blogging. It has comment spam protection, a huge array of powerful plugins, tagging, RSS feeds and really easy to extend and customise. Why not use Wordpress as a Forum?

On the demo forum, with the aid of some plugins I’ve added OpenID support, email subscriptions for new topics and comments, and it pulls from my own blog the latest news about TDO Mini Forms (TDOMF) as new topics.

It uses TDOMF to supply the user posting forms for starting new topics but by it’s flexibility you can also have moderated forums and special custom posting forms. For example I’ve added a TDOMF support form that turns a forum/category it into a bug tracker and help request forum.

One of the things I was unable to do was to create a real private members-only forum as I couldn’t find a plugin that would lock down posts in a category. disclose-secret promises privacy settings for categories in a future version.

The other thing I wasn’t sure how to do was integrate the theme into an existing blog so that you could simply “add” a forum to your existing blog, but that’s a lot more tricky.

But a big warning, I’m not a web designer so the theme itself is not very pretty. I mostly styled it for spacing and layout. It’s pretty thin so it should be easy enough to turn into your own look and feel. It is still a work in progress and I plan to add some more features to it, in the coming days (weeks/months/whenever):

• Sticky Posts
• XHTML compliant
• An admin screen for the configuration options
• A page template that allows user posting (so that the theme is genuinely standalone and doesn’t require TDOMF)

The other interesting thing I could do is spin off the “features” I’d add to the theme as seperate plugins: Quoting Comments and Posts, AJAX Comment Preview, Comment Quicktags, Post and Comment RSS Feed, etc. For another rain day I think.

It was originally just a thought-exercise, inspired by these non-blog uses of Wordpress: Prologue (a twitter clone) and WP-Contact Manager (an online address book). Each of theses is built using a theme, no changes to Wordpress. But the little project consumed me a bit and now I’m seriously considering it as a replacement for my existing forum.

If your interested in getting your hands on the theme or knowing more about how I did anything, please feel free to post on the demo forum or drop a comment below!

The good news is that I’ve started the 2-last major feature of TDOMF: multiple form support. It’s also the reason why I won’t be doing any bug fixe releases. Don’t worry, I’ll still look at bugs and continue to provide support, but I’m sadly just a one-track devolper.

FYI: It’s coming along slowly. In principal, the lower backend is mostly done (have to update the widgets to use it). However the important bit is the admin interface, that’ll drive most of the changes. I can’t wait to finish it though. It’ll open up a whole vista of potential!

Open Bugs as of 0.9.4:

• Invalid markup used in form elements!

TODOs as of 0.9.4:

• Multiple form support
  • Allow users to submit Pages
  • Allow users to submit Links
  • User groups (instead of roles)
• More Template Tags
  • Log
  • Moderation Queue
  • Approved Posts
  • File Info
  • Country codes on submitter’s IP
• Allow moderators append a message to the approved/rejected notification (not that hard to do, store the message as a postmeta, notification code grabs the message from postmeta, uses it and then deletes it from post meta)
• Allow admins to modify messages to user for…
  • Submitted post awaiting moderation
  • Submitted post automatically published
  • Banned IP, Banned user and other insufficent priviliges messages
• Widget Manager Menu
  • Info about loaded widgets
  • Disable loading of widgets
  • Editor pane for widgets
• Improvements for current widgets
  • Upload Files: Multiple instances
  • Upload Files: Thumbnail size options for upload files
  • Upload Files: Limit size of image by w/h
  • Content (and Custom Field): TinyMCE Integration
  • Custom Fields: Radio groups, multiple checkboxs (grid-layout)
  • 1 Question Captcha: Randoming questions for Captcha
  • 1 Question Captcha: Validate at post time, not at preview
  • Email verification of non-registered users
  • Category: options for list size, width, include cats and multiple default categories
  • Notify Me: Option to always notify submitter
  • Image Captcha should not reload on every preview
  • Update “getcat” plugin with control UI
  • Upload Files: Image cropping
• Edit style-sheet for form inside TDOMF (possible have multiple styles)
• Edit post support
  • Unregistered user editing (lots of strange reprecussions here)
• AJAX support (probably never)
• Spam Protection
  • Integration with Akismet
  • SPAM button in moderation page
• Force Preview (user must preview first before submission)
• Allow newly submitted posts be set to “Post ready for review” with Wordpress 2.3
• A “manage download” menu
• Documentation on creating your own widgets
• Widget to popup text instead of statically presenting text
• Allow users to define their own quicktags
• Prevent plugin from being acitvate if register_globals is enabled
• Mark validation to widgets as for “preview” or “post”
• Allow some way to ask for input during validation (i.e. for captchas)
• Throttle number of submissions per “day” (hour/min) per “ip” (user)
• Add a “title” field to the file upload for file links/attachment pages
• Control who can access form by role and/or user, ip and capability.

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Version 0.5 enables true ‘or’ tag intersection when using a category. It wasn’t working prior to this (and no-one noticed). Thanks to Joel Giddey for spotting it.

Wordpress 2.3 introduced native tagging support, which is rather nifty.

But did you know that you can display multiple tags in the one archive and even generate a feed for that?

• “http://your-blog-uri/?tag=tag1,tag2” this would get all the posts tagged with tag1 or tag2.
• “http://your-blog-uri/?tag=tag1+tag2” this would get all the posts tagged with tag1 and tag2
• “http://your-blog-uri/?tag=tag1,tag2&feed=rss” this would get you an RSS feed for all the posts tagged with tag1 or tag2

Neat huh? But did you notice that on the generated tag page you see only one tag listed in the header? This function fixes that and displays all tags used to generate that tag archive. It does this by silently modifying the single_tag_title template tag. It’ll even work on the RSS feed generated by that page!

What would be also be cool is to be able to intersect categories and tags so you could grab posts with tags from a specific category for example?

With this plugin you can. It’s not perfect however. It only allows intersection between a single category and one or more tags. Technically Wordpress should be able to support multiple categories and tags intersections but it didn’t work for me in Wordpress 2.3.x and 2.5.

So go to one of your category pages. If your using using fancy permalinks then at the end of the url add “?tdo_tag=a_tag“. If your not using permalinks then you can just use “&tdo_tag=a_tag“. You must use the tag slug, not the full tag name. You can use multiple tags as above using “,” and “+”.

• Example not using fancy permalinks: “http://your-blog-uri/?cat=35&tdo_tag=tag1,tag2” this would get all posts in category with id 35 and tagged with either tag1 or tag2.
• Example using fancy permalinks: “http://your-blog-uri/category/mycategory/?tdo_tag=tag1+tag2” this would get all posts in the category “mycategory” and tagged with both tag1 and tag2.

This plugin uses this intersection code to automatically modify the built-in tag cloud template tag wp_tag_cloud so that if it is used on a category archive, it shows only the tags within that category. You can then click on a tag in that tag cloud and it will get the posts for in that category that tagged with that tag. (You can disable this and just use the specific template as you need).

However I’ve implemented a huge number of little improvements and bug fixes that I think it might be worth making a v0.9.3 release now. The code is currently running on the demo site without a hick-up which is great. Included will be changes to the category widget (multiple selection!), extra debug stuff, disabling “Your Submissions” page, etc.

To wet your appetite, here is the full changelog so far for v0.9.3:

• Fixed customfield textfield control radio group in Firefox
• Fixed customfield textfield ignoring size option
• Fixed customfield textarea putting magic quotes on HTML
• Fixed customfield textfield not handling HTML and quotes well.
• Fixed customfield textfield not handling foreign characters well.
• Fixed customfield textarea quicktag’s extra button only working on post content’s quicktag’s toolbar
• Updated customfield to optionally can automatically add value to post with a user defined format
• Removed any “short tag” versions (i.e. use “< ?php” instead of “?>?>?>
• Add link to view post from moderator notification email
• Auto add buttons to post content to “approve” or “reject” submission on the spot
• Enable/disable preview of customfield value
• Added option to Upload Files widget to use direct links
• Get phpinfo page
• Conf dump page
• Updated stylesheet to look nice in IE
• Fixed borked thumbnails from v0.9
• Fixed some issues with file uploading and safe_mode
• New Option: Enable/Disable “Your Submissions” page
• New Option: Enable extra debug log messages
• Make the tags widget conditional on the existance of ‘wp_set_post_tags’. This will improve backwards compatibility with Wordpress < 2.3 (officially unsupported)
• Category widget: Multiple category selection
• Category widget: Display as list
• Customfield now supports select and checkbox options

Short summary:

• Potential fix for the never-ending “session_start” problem. Using template_redirect instead of get_header.
• New Suppress Error Messages (works to a point)
• Warnings about register_globals added
• Fix for file uploads mkdir for windows included. Thansk to “feelexit” on the TDOMF forums for the patch
• “Latest Submissions” added to main Dashboard
• Two widgets for your theme!
• Fixed 1-q captcha widget not accepting quotes (”)

And already today I’ve fixed two more bugs…

I’ve done some experimentation and I’ve changed from using the action hook “get_header” to “template_redirect” which should get called before any theme pages are called. This would allow you to change and modify your theme without worrying about session_start for TDO Mini Forms. However, I’m not entirely confident it’ll work in all cases, so I’m looking for anyone willing to test it?

You can download the updated version from Wordpress.org’s svn. This version also has an option to hide error messages from the user, in case your getting incorrectly reported errors, which seems to happen occasionally to some users. It’d be great if people tried this version of the plugin with their unmodified themes and report back here. If everything is good, I’ll make an 0.9.2 release with these fixes. Thanks everyone.

BTW, if your getting “TDOMF: Bad data submitted…” when you submit a post but you have no other errors, this may be because you have register_globals enabled. Having register_globals enabled is actually a security risk and Wordpress takes some preemptive solution to prevent that… by reseting all the values in $_SESSION to NULL. This will prevent TDO Mini Forms from working. With the updated version, there is a check performed and if you go to the main TDOMF menu, you will see an ERROR if it is an issue for your installation.

But don’t worry, I’m about to release 0.9.1 with a few bug fixes for 0.9. One of them being a problem with the Quicktags javascript and admin emails. I will be releasing this this evening (when I get home).

Update: I’ve doubled checked wordpress.org. The version is listed as 0.8 on the sidebar, but if you download it’ll download 0.9 zip! What’s even stranger is if you go to Older versions and click on 0.8, you’ll get 0.9. Something has got screwed up here. I hope the guys on wordpress.org sort it out. So for now, you can download 0.9 from there. v0.9.1 will go up tonight and I’ll update the page here then.

Update #2:: Doh! It’s all my mistake. I updated the readme.txt, the build number that’s stored internally in the plugin, etc. except I didn’t think of actually updating the version number of the plugin. So I release 0.9 with a 0.8 version number. Corrected now. You can get your hands on 0.9 from Wordpress.org page, but be aware that v0.9.1 bug-fix version will be made available tonight. Sorry for the confusion.