While I’ve been on holiday and not doing anything on TDO Mini Forms, others have been quite busy:

How to use custom taxonomies in TDO Mini Forms (from ilovecolors).

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.

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.

I asked, not too long ago, if anyone had suggestions on sharing stuff from google reader in a nice way into WordPress. No-one answered and I didn’t find any solutions myself.

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.

I know you can setup a “Send To” in Google Reader to post items from Google Reader in your WordPress blog. But the format of the post is awful. It holds just a link and a title. I’d like something a kin to the way the posts are presented in Google Reader. YouTube videos expanded, summary of the post, my comment/note on it, etc. Anyone have any suggestions?

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).

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!