Posts tagged with keywords "Wordpress", page 2
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 was planning on holding off on this release and get all the necessary “fixes” and “small improvements” done but I think it’s worth releasing what I’ve fixes so far (because there is quite a lot of them), so here is v0.12.4 of TDO Mini Forms from Wordpress.org. (You’ll be able to update automatically from the Wordpress UI in just a little bit).
One of the big issues with v0.12.3 was that when some users upgraded to Wordpress 2.6.2, they found that TDO Mini Forms clashed with a number of other plugins. You can read the full forum support thread here. What they found was that they would either get random Server 500 errors or be locked out of their blog. (FYI: when this happens you should be able quickly get to the source of it by looking at you’re hosts error logs.)
In my tests I found that the file .htaccess (used by the Apache webserver to control access to files among other things) had got messed up. Once I deleted it I was able to get back into my blog and then I let my blog re-create the file and all clashes with other plugins disappeared. I was abel to run the full list of “offending” plugins with no errors.
However it seems there was another reason so if you’re on 1and1 hosting, you should check out that solution. Essentially the problem is solved by running Wordpress (and therefore all the plugins) using PHP5 (1and1 seem to be using a earlier version of PHP by default). You can easily check your version using the phpinfo link (and there is a nice little helpful message printed at the top of the TDOMF admin screen if you’re using a version less than PHP5).
I’m not going to spend any more time investigating this bug as it has completely slowed down development of new features and other bugs. If you really are desperate to get TDOMF up and running under PHP4, please consider “donating“.
I’ve also spend time updating the included Readme.txt (which is also automatically HTML-ified on Wordpress.org), with lots of useful info. So please make sure to RTFM! 
So what else is actually in this release?
- More Error Checking and Error Reporting (which hopefully will help people understand what they’ve done wrong instead of needing to post on the forums)
- Disabled multiple revisions being created when a post is submitted
- Improved the AJAX code on the form
- Re-implemented Import and Export of Forms and brought back a cleaned up tdomfinfo
- Default generated forms are W3C Compliant
- Queue period time is now, hopefully, calculated correctly
- Comment Notification Emails are no longer sent to inaproppiate users, such as users that cannot flag comments as spam or delete them
- And tons of bug fixes!
If you want the full list, check the readme.txt.
What I’m still working on, which I had hoped originally to release altogether:
- Bug with AJAX and the Captcha Widget
- A New Extract Widget
- Error, Validation and CSS Hacking for the Form Hacking
- Looking at a way, maybe, to replace the current Captcha solution with the popular captcha from the Recaptcha plugin
- Updates to the Tag Widget
- And more bug fixes from the never-ending list!
And maybe, after all that, I might get around to doing Post Editing…
You can Support TDOMF by:
Rate it on Wordpress.org!
I managed to get through all the support requests on the local forums and on wordpress.org with regards the TDO Mini Forms plugin. So along with that and what I had planned it seems I have my work cut out for me. The good news is that TDOMF required no updates for Wordpress 2.6.x.
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In the Wordpress codex, it explains how to modify what posts are in the loop by modifying the Wordpress Query object. However there is a catch with this, because by using rewind_posts() for example, you are generating a brand new query to the database that doesn’t trigger plugins.
Specifically this came up when creating the current theme for my webpage. I wanted to use my tdo-tag-fixes plugin that filters posts on a category template based on a tag. This initially worked fine, but I wanted to tweak the theme so that some category pages displayed all posts from that category but yet could be filtered by tags. (Check out my download section where you can filter downloads by clicking on the tag cloud on the left). Apparently other people are suffering similar problems too when they use the tdo-tag-fixes plugin while trying to modify the query within their theme.
To list all the posts in a category template isn’t hard at all. I just had to set the query var “nopaging” to true and do a rewind_posts(). (You also have to set the category_name again). Once I had implemented this in my category template, the tag filtering stopped working. What was happening was that rrewind_posts() created a brand new query, overwriting any previous set query vars and basically going around my tdo-tag-fixes plugin.
However there is a solution to this (basically how tdo-tag-fixes is implemented in fact). So what you need to do is modify the query before it gets to the template. This way it should be in addition to any other plugins that modify the query (unless your theme overwrites them).
So in my functions.php I did something like this:
add_action('parse_request','show_all_entries_in_category');
function show_all_entries_in_category(
$args
)
{
$categories_list = array( 1, 3, 4 );
// this if checks if it's for a category template
//
if(isset($args->query_vars['category_name']))
{
$cat = get_category_by_path($args->query_vars['category_name']);
// if one of the special categories, disable paging
//
if(in_array($cat->term_id,$categories_list))
{
// make sure all posts are displayed in this category
//
$args->set_query_var('nopaging',true);
}
}
}
This piece of code will check set the “nopaging” query var on the wp_query for categories with ids 1, 3 or 4, which means that for those category pages all posts will be listed with no previous and next page links.
You can of course alter the code with in show_all_entries_in_category() with what ever query modifications you need to do.
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!
I don’t pretend to be a great web designer or programmer. Most of the stuff I do is really just tinkering and as part of that I decided it was time to create a new look for thedeadone.net, which involves creating a new “Theme” for Wordpress. About a week ago, I got the theme up and running, the layout done. I’ve kept adding configurable options so that I can use it as a standard Wordpress theme and also have it customised to how I think thedeadone.net should be done. I decided, as a first step, I’d change the colour scheme to match my previous theme, then install the new theme here and start using it.
A week later I’m ready to throw my laptop out the window. At first, I didn’t find it hard, modifying the CSS stylesheets to get the right look and spacing. I checked it in Opera and used Firebug in Firefox, everything was great. Then I tried it in Internet Explorer and elements were all over the place. Slight padding changes would shift around half the page, I had to start again, adding fixes and changes to get it to work in Internet Explorer. It sucks. It’s like writing code that is completely standards compliant but finding it doing utter different things on different operating systems.
Anyway, I’ve started to use the new theme here. It’s not finished, lots of stuff to do on it, but I’d rather see it in action than continue to work in the dark on it.
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I’ve been working on a new theme for thedeadone.net for a little while now. The functionality is about 90% there. The layout is 99% done. But there is about 50% more to go. I have to choose colours and modify the layout with icons and images to make it “pretty”. I also need to make it work for the forum so at least I have a similar theme across the two sites.
I’m actually very happy with it so far, but its been a lot more work than I anticipated. The current theme I have, I don’t like at all, even though I created it. Even though I haven’t done colours or images yet, I’m very tempted to actually start using the new one now, because the layout will greatly improve usability of my site.
If you have the time, check out our “Murder of Crows” gaming site where I have rolled out the unfinished theme and tell me what you think?
Update #1: (9.35am) Ah pants. Just as I posted this, “Murder of Crows” gaming site isn’t up any more. In fact Redbrick’s webservers seem to be done.
It’s becoming a common query about how to make the content field in a TDO Mini Forms WYSIWYG (“What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get”). A WYSIWYG editor is where you see that your input is bold when you set it to bold, instead of seeing it plain with bold tags around the text. This tutorial will run you through quickly how to set this up.
Update #1: There is a bug with this tutorial. There is an incompatiblity between the AJAX code in TDOMF and using TinyMCE. Please disable AJAX before proceeding with this tutorial. If you have already done this, please disable AJAX. Then reset the form and then re-do the steps in this tutorial.
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