Tag Archives: php

Contact Form for wordpress

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For a client of mine, i’ve been using the PEAR-package HTML_QuickForm which is ‘superseded’ by now and isn’t compatible to php 5.2, whereas the followup package HTML_Quickform2 is still in alpha state. Since the client switched his server and that is running php 5.2, i had to come up with a new solution. I tried out many wordpress contact-form-plugins but they all did not satisfy me fully.

The only form-plugin that i truly would recommend is cForms II. It is flexible, can handle more than one form template. Forms can be inserted via template files or via tags inside posts or pages. I think this is the only plugin that supports individual Fieldsets (this can be very handy for designing complex layouts). The verification of the user input is done with very individual regular expressions. The admin can set Form field name, tooltip and default value and even let the default value be auto-cleared once the form field is activated. cForms II supports multi-page forms (which i didn’t use, though) and it can autoconfirm emails to the user (which i didn’t use either). Spam detection is done not only with the individual regular expressions, but also with a captcha-plugin or alternativey with a simple Q&A-field (like, ‘what color is snow?’). The possible questions for the Q&A field can be set manually. You can even backup and restore the form settings! Furthermore the admin can chose from a dozen css-layouts and manually change them.

Here are the other plugins, that i tried out:

  • Contact Form 7: It didn’t seem to have a template tag, that i could use in the theme files.
  • Form Builder: Very bad design. It features div-tags that are floated. If your design uses floating objects, it will break it or be broken itself!
  • Scaleable Contact Form plugin: Nearly no option to verify the user input. Supports Captcha, but it uses the plugin “simple captcha” for that, which doesn’t seem to support wordpress 2.9.
  • Spam-Free Contact Form: simply crap. don’t use that.
  • Visitor Contact: only interesting, if you like using external web applications on your own blog.

Pingbacks and Trackbacks work again in WordPress

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For quite some time, i had a problem getting pingbacks and trackbacks working. Receiving them wasn’t a problem, but i couldn’t send any. It seems, i’m not alone and no where were any answers to be found..

I think i found the problem: the function spawn_cron (/wp-includes/cron.php, 153) opens a socket to then wp-cron.php file after adding a new scheduled item. For that reason it runs the function wp_remote_post which also accepts a timeout parameter. That parameter is set to 0.01 by default. I guess these are seconds (which means these are 10 milliseconds!) and for some webservers this value is simply too small. Change that to something bigger (i’m using 0.1 or 1) and pingbacks and trackbacks should work again..

Now what about the old trackbacks and pingbacks that didn’t get sent? Actually you’ll simply need to write a new post and all the old unsent pings should be scheduled for sending. If you don’t want to do that, you could install the plugin Wp-Crontrol where you can specify a hook to be scheduled to a specific time. Schedule the hook “do_pings” to be triggered any time soon (parameter should be empty = “[]“) and it should take care of the old pingsbacks.

Erste Version von wp-stattraq veröffentlicht

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Eben gerade habe ich die erste neue Version von wp-stattraq auf wordpress.org freigegeben. Ich habe das Plugin nur insoweit verändert, als ich es für wordpress 2.6 lauffähig gemacht habe und dabei die Ausgabe des Plugins in die normale Administrationsobefläche integriert habe.

Später möchte ich noch einige Mankos des Plugins (die ich als langzeitiger Nutzer gut kenne) beseitigen. Aber vorerst müssen einige Integrationsprobleme (wie die automatische Installation bereinigt werden).

Wer Änderungswünsche und -vorschläge hat, sollte diese bitte direkt im trac-system als ticket eintragen:

http://trac.toomuchcookies.net/trac/wiki

Auch in Planung (code ist eigentlich schon fertig) ist ein plugin, das bei der seo-optimierung helfen soll und das soll die Daten von wp-stattraq nutzen. Dazu später mehr..

First version of wp-stattraq is released

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Some seconds ago i’ve uploaded the first new version of wp-stattraq to the wordpress plugin directory. I’ve changed the plugin to be incooperated into the administration panel and work with version 2.6 of wordpress (which it didn’t up until now).

I’m planning to put more features into the plugin and squash more bugs, but right now, i’m concentrating on releasing a stable version (as in 2.6-stable) as fast as possiblem, that can be easily installed. This first version is mainly meant for those, who were running wordpress already and need this update to be able to work with wordpress 2.6.

You can follow the updates and file tickets by visiting the trac-system i set up:

http://trac.toomuchcookies.net/trac/wiki

Also, i’m planning on releasing more plugins related to wp-stattraq that contribute to seo-work.. Look forward for more to come..