In this month’s edition of “well-built plugins”, we’re taking a look at Contact Form 7 for WordPress. Specifically, we’ll be customizing validation error messages on the front end. The popular contact form builder plugin is quite easy to extend, so let’s jump right in.
Extending well-built WordPress plugins and themes is something I do almost daily. Gravity Forms is a popular form-building plugin for WordPress that I integrate and customize quite frequently. Custom form fields, form settings, and third-party integrations are common requests.
Recently, I had to find a way to handle custom, dynamic redirects on form submission. The redirect would be dependent on query string parameters provided by an inbound affiliate link. I was able to quickly create a solution due, in no small part, to the fact that Gravity Forms is a “well-built” plugin.
For years now, the word "social" has permeated every aspect of our online experiences. Integrating social aspects into development projects has been the norm for a long while now. That being said, some actors within the tech world seem to push the boundaries of what is acceptable when aggregating user-identifying data. Results of these aggregations/linkages range from harmless to outright creepy. Such an instance happened to me recently, and I thought I'd share as yet another warning to those who choose to share openly.
As WordPress continues its march towards the Gutenberg-focused version 5.0, today it released an intermediate update. Version 4.9.2 is pretty standard fare for a "dot" release, resolving an XSS vulnerability in the MediaElement library and 21 bug fixes. Per usual, make sure your installation is updated as soon as possible. If you need help, please contact me.
The bug fixes include enhanced browser compatibility, styling issues, and enabling MySQLi by default.
With the seriousness of the release out of the way, I'd like to discuss a bit of comic relief embedded in on the the Trac tickets resolved in this release.
WordPress has released its 12th update for 2017, and it's also the second minor version pushed out this year. WordPress 4.9 includes a lot for users. "Tipton" introduces changesets for theme customizations, previewing, and scheduling of theme customizer updates and code editing syntax highlighting, autocompletion, and error checking using CodeMirror. Finally, there's a new Gallery widget and an "Add Media" button for the venerable text widget.
As usual with each new release, I look for improvements and additions for developers. Although there isn't quite as much for developers in this specific version, there are a few key inclusions that I wanted to highlight.