Firas Durri » Projects

WordPress Contact Form Competitors

Firas — Sun, 29 May 2005 20:37:36 +0000

One of the reasons that I haven’t been too motivated to work on WP-CC much, despite being very excited about its potential, is the lack of competition. WP-ContactForm, Ryan Duff’s plugin which I collaborate on, has no such issues–in March came a fork called PXS Mail Form, which introduced more input validation, and some days ago intouch was released, which is another fork but with a decent amount of modifications done on top of WPCF (custom fields and ajax).

We borrowed the idea of highlighting invalid fields with red borders from PXS Mail, and have had custom fields and ajax planned for a while. We’re also focused implementing an extensibility framework, which will be quite sweet. Look out for a smokin’ hot WPCF release next week.

WP-CC Translations

Firas — Tue, 24 May 2005 20:42:42 +0000

So there are rumbles of discontent about the lack of development on WP-CC. I concede; guilty as charged. I’ll return to it in a bit, but meanwhile, check out these excellent translations:

WP-CC in Italian by Federico Scarel.
WP-CC in Spanish by Miguel MartÃn.

Project Log for April 01 ’05

Firas — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 02:13:33 +0000

Hi there. Not much has been said between us for a while. Well, since I’ve been working on other things instead of writing, I finally have something to update with: descriptions of what I’m working on! This is also for those of you who’re here mainly because of the stuff I put together rather than my brilliant textual issuances. Without further ado, the Project Log for April 1 ’05:

Shortly after the release of Ryan Duff’s Contact Form plugin for WordPress, WP-ContactForm 1.0, he graciously agreed to sign me on as co-developer . I did some commits, and we have a new version out. 1.0 had 1,417 downloads since its release a couple months ago and 1.1 has had 189 downloads in just over 48 hours. Call me biased, but I think those are cool numbers.
I have lots of ideas for WP-CC. I’ve just realized how uncharted the area of CC licensing metadata is. Time to set some trends I should get a download counter going for that; my logs show 74 downloads of wp-cc 1.0, 745 of 0.1.1 and 418 of 0.1.2.

Umm, that’s it. I’m in the midst of setting up some stuff (a couple of Planet aggregators) and don’t want to write about them prematurely, so you’ll hear of them at a random time at this same place.

Wow

Firas — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 03:58:15 +0000

Ok, what I wanted to write was an entry saying, ‘whoa, I figured I’d try my hand at a simplistic WP plugin to learn how to make them, and I got so many links? OMG checkmeout on technorati!’

Instead I’ll act a bit more gracefully and mention that WP-CC 0.1.1 has been released. All WP-CC 0.1 users should upgrade since it fixes a pretty unacceptable bug with the text output of by-sa licenses. (Also fixed a Bridget Jones issue.)

Interestingly, I didn’t catch that bug randomly or from a report, but because I was trying to figure out what sort of testing script makes sense with PHP and saw the incongruous result on a particular parameter. Looks like I might make a complete test suite, one for each function—the code’s simple enough. It’s a very academic approach to bug-squashing, but hey, it’s what I was taught in a previous life as an IB ComSci student and it did just come in useful.

Check out these Japanese, German, Spanish and French entries on WP-CC. (Update: Portuguese! Italian! Arabic!) What they basically mean is that internationalization/localization will need to be fully supported on 0.2. Note that I said supported, not implemented—I couldn’t write German to save my life!

Speaking of 0.2, I have some great ideas that would make it really slick. It’ll be mainly a rewrite—because it’ll use creativecommons.org to pick licenses and get the associated data rather than have that sort of thing hard-coded into the plugin—but it’ll also go a step further, such as an integrated update-checker. Neat, huh? I love the ‘if you can imagine it, you can build it’ aspect of programming.