Gravity Forms - WordPress Form Management

UPDATE: The issue issue fixed as of version 1.1.1 so I am removing my hotfix as it is no longer needed. Thank to Zack Katz creator of the Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-on for the quick fix.

I use Gravity Forms for a lot of things.  Recently I needed to integrate some forms with Salesforce the wildly popular CRM system.  At first I developed a more or less manual method to post the form information to Salesforce and redirect back to the confirmation page.  This was impractical in that every time one of the content contributors needed to create form that would post to Salesforce I had to manually build the redirect. By chance I was looking for something else in the WordPress plugin repository and ran across the Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-on.

This plugin is a free Salesforce Add-On for Gravity Forms that adds contacts directly into Salesforce, making lead generation even easier to use with WordPress.  The plugin advertised that it added one setting, a check a box when configuring your forms, and all of those form entries would be added to Salesforce.  There was only one problem.  Checkbox or no the plugin was posting every form to Salesforce, which meant that many forms that shouldn’t be posting contact information to Salesforce were doing so.

I contacted the developer to see if there was a solution but as of this post I have yet to hear back from him.  The plugin is really good on the Salesforce side of things and I couldn’t wait to hear back from the developer so I started looking through the code to see if I could solve the problem for myself.  After a bit of poking around I discovered that there was no check to see if the form had the Salesforce Integration checkbox selected or not.  A few lines of code later I had fixed the bug – or at least patched it to my satisfaction and the checkbox was working.  Only forms that have been designated to integrate with Salesforce were doing so.

I contacted the developer again with a list of the changes so that he will hopefully integrate them into the next release.  In the meantime if you are using the Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-On and you are having the same problem you can grab the hotfix below.

Roman Forum and Colosseum (credit: rmlowe)

I’m switching the forums back to bbPress now that there is a bbPress WordPress plugin for it.  I’m going to try to port all the messages back but there I’m not sure how that will work out.  So please be patient if you feel you need to post to the forums.  I had previously used bbPress but is seemed that no progress was being made regarding development so I switched to Mingle Forum.  Turns out bbPress was more useful – I was able to track topics better and respond better to posts. So that said I need to fix a few style issue and and try to port the posts back to bbPress and then the forums will be available once again.

UPDATE: In retrospect I’ve decided not to import the existing forum content for a couple of reasons.  One, I don’t have the time to do it.  And, two, I’d just like to start fresh with the forums and simplify them.

Glessner Covered Bridge, Somerset County, PA

I have a number of new features in the works for Lightbox Plus for WordPress and I thought I’d go ahead and mention some of them here now. I was hoping to release the version today or tomorrow but it looks like it’s probably going to be later in the week. In any event I have the following items planned.

Lightbox Positioning

An option to set fixed positioning that will keep the lightobox centered in the visitor’s viewport while scrolling the page.  Also the option to specify the horizontal and vertical position of the lightbox on the page.

Lightbox Plus Interface

Option to turn on or off grouping labels, and a fix for the grouping labels not always saving when changed.  Option to turn of scroll bars even if content overflows the lightbox.  And finally and option to open the lightbox immediately when a visitor lands on the page.

Inline Lightboxes

Ability to set additional option for them such as Overlay Opacity, Overlay Close, Transition Type and Resize Speed.

Lightbox Plus for WordPress Admin Interface

I intend to reorganize some of the elements of the WordPress admin interface to provide a more consistent experience for users and make it easier to find settings.

The main new feature that I added was the ability to auto-lightbox links to images that did not have an image in the link (i.e. text links to images.)  I also added additional control over the width and height of images which can allow for interesting display options and different handling for long text.

Lightbox Plus now also works with WordPress MU.  It has been tested with version 2.9.2 of WordPress MU and works quite well.  It can be enabled globally or individually.

Full list of changes below.

1.6.8

• Fixed duplicate rel=lightbox[] tags being generated.
• Fixed IE 6 specific stylesheets – should provide correct headers for php based css documents.
  • AlphaImageLoader should automatically be configure for old verions of IE – 6 or less
• As of this version IE 6 or less are no longer supported.
  • If you are using IE 6 or less it is recommended that you upgrade your browser.
• Added option to auto-lightbox text links to images
• Added additional width and height options
  • width – can set a fixed total width. This includes borders and buttons.
  • height - can set a fixed total height. This includes borders and buttons.
  • innerWidth – This is an alternative to ‘width’ used to set a fixed inner width. This excludes borders and buttons.
  • innerHeight – This is an alternative to ‘height’ used to set a fixed inner height. This excludes borders and buttons.
  • initialWidth - can set the initial width, prior to any content being loaded.
  • initialHeight – can set the initial height, prior to any content being loaded.
• Updated admin.css and admin-html.php to correct a top level class that may effect global styles.
• Now works correctly with WordPress MU
  • Tested with WordPress MU 2.9.2
• Degradation of performance in Firefox corrected. May still occur in older versions
  • Note: with the release of Firefox 3.0.19 the 3.0.x branch of Firefox will reach its end of life on March 30, 2010

You can download Lightbox Plus from WordPress.org or 23systems or download Lightbox Plus 2.4.6 directly.

If you require support you can go to the Lightbox Plus message board.

Lightbox Plus Demo and Example

I’ve updated Lightbox Plus to version 1.5.5.  It has numerous fixes including:

• Optimized and updated additional code to use less memory and run faster
• Separated the admin panel output to a separate file
• Added some custom admin panel styles
• Fixed bug where titles were being broken when DO NOT USE TITLE is checked.
• Fixed issue with limited character sets – should allow any characters in the title
• Updated ColorBox to version 1.2.9
• Some cosmetic changes to admin panel

You can get it from WordPress.org or 23systems download Lightbox Plus 2.4.6 directly.

The idea is that I have all my blog integrated to post to both Facebook and Twitter so that I can simplify my life and get more generative tendancies flowing rather than trudging through the peat bog.

If all goes well this should result in a lot more activity on both Twitter and Facebook from me.

A bug was pointed out to me recently that may be causing issues with IE – I’m going to correct that and hopefully that will solve some of the problems people have been having.

Issues with the lightbox tags rel=lightbox not showing up is probably due to the Image Title or Image Caption not being set. Images added prior to LB+ installation may or may not have them. Images added in older versions of WordPress (2.3-) probably won’t have them.

I have just released another version that correct a definite IE error with Lightbox Plus so please let me know if this solves your issue.  It may also correct the issue with the Loading and Close image paths as well.

Get it here: Lightbox Plus 2.4.6 (9605)