Plugins

Hey Rockie,

You were right in asking me, I’ve been using cformsII a lot lately so I know I can help you. I wrote step by step instructions for how I put together my Contact Page but I can tell you some more tidbids here.

The biggest thing in cformsII is to keep hitting “Update Settings” if you don’t that next action could erase the last things you did. Last night I was working on the Form Settings for an Artist Interview questionnaire and I had made a lot of changes to Fields then I deleted a field that I did not need. Bad move, I should have clicked “Update Settings” first to save all my work, then hit the delete.

As for Styling, most people want to change the basic form style. This is where it can get confusing until you have played with the cformsII plugin for WordPress for a little while.

Read this to avoid a problem. I found that I could NOT simply reload a page I was previewing either published or not and have the changes I made in cformsII show up. This was while I was changing the Style of the form. I had to go to the Dashboard and “Save” my page/post again to make the changes. Even thought there were no changes to the page on the dashboard, the form needed the save to show the latest changes. So if reload does not show your change, go to the DashBoard and “Save” the page.

I had to do this dance to see the different form styles that cformsII plugin for WordPress had.

Caveat: This could have happened because I just installed the WP Super Cache plugin for WordPress.

Here is another bit a quirkiness that I experienced.

The Styling page is for the last form you were working on. You can NOT change forms from this page. If you have two or more forms, make sure you have chosen the correct one before clicking on the “Style” button.

If you go back to Form Settings, it will default back to the 1st form so if you are still working on another form you will need to select it first.

Best tip for cformsII plugin for WordPress: Pay very careful attention to the settings and do not assume.

Thesis Theme for WordPress Steps

Rockie, I know you are using the Thesis theme for WordPress. Here are the steps I take setting up the page. I will just put the cformsII tag in the body.

(Thesis Theme Users) Scroll down and choose “Page Template” and pick “Page Without Sidebars”.

Unless you want your sidebars. For me the form is the most important thing so I like the page without the sidebars. I would rather the user fill out the form than click a link.

Bonus: if you change any css you need to make a backup of it. When you update the plugin for WordPress, cformsII, it could overwrite anything you change there. Having a backup will ensure you keep your cformsII CSS safe.

If you really have to change the css I, and the author of cformsII recommend you use Firebug.

So to summarize,

1. if you need step by step instructions read this post
2. Hit “Update Settings” after you make changes.
3. If your changes are NOT showing up, click “Save” on the page from the WordPress Dashboard.
4. Always watch the settings to make sure it did what you wanted

My forms are here and so far, I have not changed any css:
(Well I did change the font size on one form but when I upgraded I had not saved my css so it was changed back)

Contact page with Fancy White form style

Contact page with the basic cforms.css form style

Directory Submission (with lots of check boxes) with the Wide Form form style

Artist Interview (with 30+ fields) with the Wide Open No Border form style

The biggest thing in cformsII is to keep hitting “Update Settings” if you don’t that next action could erase the last action.

You can use cformsII plugin for WordPress for the comments field for your blog. The latest update had a focus on that including compatibility with the plugin Comment Love. I don’t get too many comments yet so I have not researched this. If you know about using cformsII plugin for WordPress as the comments field, please use my old fashion comments field to tell me about it.

Email to me that prompted this post:

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 10:56 PM, Rockie L. Gaddie wrote:

Hey Wordpress guru!

How can I add a form for people to subscribe to a newsletter?

Thanks
Rg

————————————————————-
Yancey says:
Get the Thesis Theme for WordPress and Enjoy Outsourcing the Update Headaches

I’ve been ordered by the Queen to add another plugin.

After reading on the WordPress Blog that The official site of the British Prime Minister’s Office is using the WP Super Cache I decided it was time to act.

For you the reader, the plugin makes the site load quickly. For the blog owner it reduces the load on your server.

It was an easy installation. After installing the WP Super Cache Plugin I went to the WP Super Cache Manager.

Under “WP Super Cache Status” I clicked “ON”

UPDATE: I’ve changed to “HALF ON” so the page will reset with the default hourly rather than after 100 requests. Based on info here from Rick Beckman.

Under “Super Cache Compression” I clicked “Enabled”

I could see experimenting with the “Expiry Time” if you had over 2500 page views a day. I’m under that unless you go tell ALL your friends to drop by.

“Cache contents” shows you how many pages you have currently cached and also those expired. After turning WP Super Cache on I browsed my site then came back and saw my cached pages go up. This is one way you know it is working. This is where you can Delete Expired and Delete Cache.

REMEMBER this if you install this plugin and then want to make changes to your home page, you may have to Delete Cache with every test of new changes to your blog.

I’ve taken the advice of the British Prime Minister’s Office and loaded WP Super Cache. Thanks for pointing this out WordPress Blog.

I spent over eight hours looking at different image plugins and testing them to see what they could do. The NextGEN Gallery stood out above the rest for me.

There are several companion plugins, some of which I will use and others did not work for me.

NextGEN-ImageFlow

NextGEN-FlashViewer

NextGEN-Gallery Widget

Galleria WP

NextGEN Smooth Gallery

There was a NextGEN Gallery Add-ons plugin but I tried to go to the Plugin Homepage but it was 404. I do not try any plugins that are neglegted by the author.

For my uses, I’m going to use the sidebar widget with the slideshow. You can see the slideshow in action to the right on this page.

I’m going to use the tilt viewer for excitement, you can see it by clicking the “Gallery” at the top of this page. I also like the Image Browser.

I’m going to use the Image Browser because the image description appears below the image. In the description I am going to put a link to the artists blog posting.

Plugins 9, 10 and 11.

This one was just for myself. I enjoy going to the COLOURlovers web site and I saw that Ozh had created a plugin that connects with COLOURlovers API.

This is for the backend or support area of WordPress, for use in the Dashboard. Ozh’s COLOURlovers’ Admin CSS Designer allows you to change the colors of the admin area. You can choose from 12 color palettes.

I have been flipping between 8 different blogs and I’m always looking at the address to make sure I’m making the right changes on the right blog. I’ve now color coded each blog so the Top Red Blog is now red, Blue is blue, etc.

Not for the users, not for security, just for me. Plugin number 8.

If you are ever stuck on color, visit the COLOURlovers site for creative inspiration.

There are several plugins out there that make it easy for users to connect with friends and social networking sites. My last favorite solution like this was a bookmarking program that allowed you to bookmark to your favorite social network site.

ShareThis is the solution I am going to try for WordPress. It is a clean plugin that shows an icon and the words “ShareThis” under each post. When a user clicks on it, they can select from 3 tabs, Social Web, Post and Send/Emal. The words “ShareThis” sound more like something I would do rather than just bookmark. I like the Sharing word. [click to continue...]

This is a web log of my blogging and next is the what I do to easily set up cformsII. This is a list for myself that I can refer back to it as I am working on my 7 blogs.

cformsII > cforms (form settings)

Change name to “Contact” [click to continue...]

I am having fun now! While digging deeper into CformsII I found a great link on the Styling page. Between Select a form style and Basic CSS editor is this text:

You might also want to study the PDF guide on cforms CSS & a web screencast I put together to give you a head start.

I followed the link and downloaded the pdf. Oliver Seidel, the author of the pdf and undoubtedly the plugin did a great job of outlining the different css areas of the form. It’s really nice but at the end he has a second section titled: “cforms Layout Development, Best Practices.”

He suggests using Firefox and Firebug. Firebug is a plugin for the Firefox browser. This is where the fun starts. [click to continue...]

I noticed a post on the Thesis forum from Casper wanting css for CformsII that matched the style sheet of Thesis. At about the same time I was messing around with the css of CformsII.

Here are the steps I took to quickly and simply change the font of the CformsII style sheet. It really helped my Contact page look more like my post pages.

Go to CformsII administration area on the Dashboard of WordPress.

1. Click “Styling” [click to continue...]

It’s hard to focus on plugins sometimes because there are so many of them. Here are the questions that I ask myself.

* Will this plugin help my blog be more secure?
* How will this plugin help my users?
* How does this plugin help my blog to succeed?
* How does this plugin help me?

Using these questions I looked at 12 plugins closely then chose to use a contact form plugin. [click to continue...]