I’m about to release version 0.9 of TDO Mini Forms. I hadn’t intended working on it in the last few weeks, but I kept picking away at it. It’s already active at the demo site, so have a gander and tell me what you think.
The big features of 0.9 are the first stab at custom fields (only textfields and textareas supported), quicktags for post content and allowing multiple instances of widgets on your form.
I should be making it available via wordpress.org at some point over the week or early next week.
Yep. Last night I made version 0.8 of TDO Mini Forms (a Wordpress Plugin) available (download it now from Wordpress.org). It contains a major new feature, the ability to upload files. I’ve promised this a while, so I’m glad to finally be able to deliver it. I also sneaked into two other new features; tagging and some category support.
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I made an emergency release of TDO Mini Forms last night due to issues with Wordpress 2.3. My own testing and reports coming in indicate that the issues are fixed.
What’s next? It’s going to have to be the upload feature. It’s still the number one requested feature. There is lots of little things that could be done fairly quickly, but the upload feature is fairly big, so I’m aiming that v0.8 will be that (and only that). I’m hoping to start on it next week.
Keep an idea on the tag and forums for news and updates.
Discuss on the forum!
I released TDO Mini Forms with minimal testing on Wordpress 2.3. Seemed to be okay. However, I just upgraded the demo site to Wordpress 2.3 and I noticed some “issues”. I will be attempting to push out a release soon to resolve them:
- The widget panel is slightly messed up. Obviously lots of the Theme widget stuff for Wordpress has been updated. The code in the plugin still works, but the admin menu looks horrible. Mostly because the stylesheet for the normal Theme widgets was moved from wp-admin to wp-admin/css.
- The “default category” option lists no categories. I’m guessing the category structure in the database has changed.
- The “remove options” button the uninstall page seriously messed up my install. Do not use it!
However, everything else seems to be working!
The lack of feedback so far for version 0.7 and 0.71 is a bit frightening. Is there anyone actually using it? Wordpress.org is reporting at least 186 downloads so far! so someone is using it.
Update #1: The reason the widget panel for TDOMF looks off, is that they’ve moved to jQuery. I don’t know how this impacts TDOMF. BTW, you can grab the latest development version. This should fix the stylesheet for the widgets for 2.3.
I got a trackback today from the themeplayground blog on my Search and Replace Wordpress Plugin. This was my first Wordpress plugin.
Anyway, Ryan was talking about the new Wordpress release, version 2.3. He said this:
The new update notifications for WordPress and Plugins seems to work real well. As soon as I had everything back up and running a modest little space opened up at the bottom of the Plugins page to notify me that there was a new version available for one of my Plugins (Search and Replace by Mark Cunningham). I like how it works; my only concern might be that update notifications are posted at the bottom of the page and not towards the top. I am glad it doesn’t pop up all over the place, but it might be a little too easy to overlook where it is now.
Cool feature I must admit. But how very odd. I haven’t downloaded Wordpress 2.3 yet so I haven’t seen this feature. However, I haven’t updated my Search and Replace plugin since 2006. I haven’t done anything special to it in a long time. It did what it needed to do and that was fine for me. I haven’t added it to Wordpress.org’s plugin repository, etc. etc. So how did Wordpress 2.3 know that my plugin was updated, even though I didn’t?
Because someone else has registered a “Search and Replace” plugin. In fact they’ve taken my original plugin and updated. Great! I have no issue with this. I didn’t know that someone had done this but that’s not important. I wasn’t going to support it anyway. However, could they have at least named it “Search and Replace 2″ (like the “Subscribe 2″ plugin was an new release by a different author of the “Subscribe” plugin) or “Advanced Search and Replace”! I can’t now register the original plugin with the correct name on Wordpress.org’s plugin repo. I’d have to call it “search and replace original” or something. While they give me credit in the plugin’s description, it’s still kind of stealing my “glory” (if there was any to have). And now it’s too late for them to change it as Wordpress.org’s API thinks “search and replace” is his plugin. Arg! I’m sure the plugin author didn’t do it out of malice, it’s still annoying. Thank god I’m not attempting to make money (say via adsense for example) for writing plugins, because then I’d be seriousily miffed!
Do you really want or need AJAX in TDO Mini Forms?
The only reason I used ajax originally in TDO Mini Forms plugin was to get around the problem of a “double submit”, where once you’ve submitted your post and then you reload the page, the post gets submitted twice. I also thought it would be the only way to do a “preview”. However, as I’m doing my code refactoring for the next version of the plugin, I built up the form normally using POST and properly corrected the double submit issue. It also now also does preview and validation, with ease. Also POST automatically solves problems I’ve had with AJAX that I’ve had to hack fixes for such as long posts and foreign characters.
It’s just that with the new implementation of the form, where it is built up dynamically from “widgets” chosen by the admin, I’m left with a problem. With POST, all the form variables are passed to the backend PHP and these variables are then thrown back to the widgets to process. With AJAX, how do I get the variables from the form without knowing in advance what they are called and serialise them into some format in javascript that can be processed by PHP? I’ve looked around on line and I’ve found no ready solutions online. Also, file uploading, a feature constantly requested, is easy enough to do with POST but complicated to do with AJAX.
From the user perspective, there isn’t much difference between AJAX and POST for the form. In one case, the form reloads the page, with the other it uses some javascript to updated a field. AJAX makes it difficult to do file uploading and introduced problems in the past.
Anyway, the hooks are there in the code for AJAX so if I can ever get over the hurdle I may implement AJAX for future versions of TDO Mini Forms.
Also, work is progressing nicely on the latest version. I have the widgets working now. There is a nice drag and drop UI to allow admins to easily organise their form. It wouldn’t take much effort now to create a “edit form” as well, if I so wished, but perhaps thats something for a later version of tdomf. Widgets will allow me (and potentially others) to create all those little features people keep requesting such as a “file uploading”, “custom fields”, “drop-down category selection”, “I agree checkboxes” etc. and allow people to sort the order of these elements in the form. I’m really looking forward to getting tdomf out and seeing how people take to it.
(I’m keeping comments closed on this post. Please you the forum to discuss this post).
Yep. As of last week, I dusted off the code and started working on TDOMF Plugin for Wordpress.
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I’ve just made a new release of my ever popular Wordpress plugin: TDO Mini Forms (v0.6). Mostly backend changes but it should be even more stable than before.
However I’ve got to take a break from working on it. I’ve made four releases of the plugin in March alone! Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed working it. But at a cost of my other projects. My non-work time is split between family, relaxation and these. I just don’t have enough time to be able to really spread it out.
Specifically my roleplaying adventure Reboot is suffering. On the publishing side momentum is building but I haven’t been support it as much as should. So I’m going concentrate on it for a while.
I’m not abandoning TDO Mini Forms and if there are any bugs I will attempt to fix them. But I am shifting my priorities around. At some undetermined point in the future I will dive back into developing the plugin.
