Category Archives: Publishing Experience

Publishing Experience, WordPress Plugins, WP API

Custom Contact Forms Redux

In 2009-2010 Custom Contact Forms was one of the first WordPress plugins I wrote. The purpose of the plugin was to solve a simple problem: easy contact form building on the web.

As I was building the plugin, WordPress 3.0 had not yet been released, and therefore custom post types and other useful API’s did not yet exist. I wrote the plugin the best I could using custom database tables (ouch!). The plugin become decently popular. I continued development on the plugin for the next year or so. In the process I learned a lot about writing code for WordPress. Also in the process I landed a job at 10up where I learned (and continue to learn) more than I ever thought I would.

Years later in 2015, here I am an experienced WordPress developer and an avid open source contributor. I have used most of the popular WordPress form plugins: Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, Formidable, etc. Using all these plugins, despite lots of great functionality, have left me with the nagging feeling that something is missing.

That something was the WordPress experience. With the release of the media manager in WordPress 3.5, we have all grown accustomed to a high quality media management experience through smooth JavaScript interactions. Form management should be no different; they should be built within a media manager-esque modal, no page reloads should be necessary, and we should get live previews of what we are building. Simple task right? 8 months later… 🙂

Detailed installation and usage instructions are on Github. Download the plugin from WordPress.org

For Users

Within the post edit screen, a simple “Add Form” button next to the “Add Media” button brings up the form manager modal:

insert-form

Within the form management modal, you can also see your existing forms and edit them if you choose:

View all your forms within the form management modal for easy access.

After inserting a form into a post, you see a nice preview within TinyMCE:

Form previews even show within TinyMCE.

While the meat of the plugin lies within the form manager, single form views exist. Within a single form view you can see a live form preview:

Live previews of your forms are generated on the fly. No more guess and test.

Also within the single form view lives the form submissions table. You can easily paginate through results and add/remove columns as you please:

Easily scroll through form submissions in tabular format. You can configure columns you would like to see to ensure an uncluttered view.

For Developers

Most of the plugin is written in JavaScript. Custom Backbone views, models, and collections are written to emulate and display forms and fields. The plugin is extremely extensible. You can easily hook in to modify existing fields and views as well as create your own.

The plugin includes the new JSON REST API for WordPress. Right now, it is included as a Composer dependency for various reasons until the API is added to WordPress core.

Note: While the plugin is suitable for production environments, version 6 is still somewhat in beta. Please let me know on Github if you experience any problems.

Standard
Publishing Experience, WordPress Core, WordPress Plugins

Given the unmet need to allow users only access to edit specific pieces of content, I created a simple plugin called Editorial Access Manager.

By default in WordPress, we can create users and assign them to roles. Roles are automatically assigned certain capabilities. However, sometimes default roles are not enough, and we have one-off situations. Editorial Access Manager lets you set which users or roles have access to specific posts (as well as pages and custom post types).

Only the Administrator and Editor role have access to manage pages by default in WordPress. Making a user an Editor gives them a lot of power. I ran into the situation where we wanted a Contributor (less power than an Editor) to be able to edit only a few pages hence the need for this plugin.

My plan is to eventually integrate this plugin with EditFlow allowing people to assign User Groups to have access to specific pieces of content.

Any development help on this project would be much appreciated! Fork the Github repo.

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