Victor Font Consulting Group, LLC

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Victor M. Font Jr.

FormidableForms: Copy Repeatable Field Val to Another

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The Problem

A user asked the following question on the FormidableForms Community Forum:

I have a form in which I used the following script to copy text from one text field to another (lookup text field). It worked until now. But now that I have moved these two fields into a repeatable section, the script has stopped working.

The Solution

When you added the fields to the repeatable section, the field ID changed.

The first field on form is field_o8v4sw-0. When you add a row to a repeatable section, the field ids will incremented. So, if you 9 more rows, the field ids will be:

field_o8v4sw-0
field_o8v4sw-1
field_o8v4sw-2
field_o8v4sw-3
field_o8v4sw-4
field_o8v4sw-5
field_o8v4sw-6
field_o8v4sw-7
field_o8v4sw-8
field_o8v4sw-9

Counting always starts at 0. Instead of checking for each individual field to change, this can be done with a wild card.

$("[id^=field_o8v4sw]").on("change", function() { //source field key
var sourceField = $(this).val(); //source field key

In order to determine the destination field, you're going to have to do some string manipulation. So the first thing we have to do is get the actual ID of the target field.

var field_id = $(this).attr("id");

Next, we need to get the number at the end of the ID. This number will be the same as the destination field.

var index_number = field_id.substr(field_id.lastIndexOf("-")+1);

Now we can populate the destination field.

var destination_field = "#field_6qubt-" + index_number;
$(destination_field).val(sourceField);

Here is your new jQuery:

Why Consider a Website Care Plan?

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Skip an Oil Change?

Success is a website care plan, public domain image from pixabay.comSuccessful websites continuously attract the right type of visitors and lead them down a path toward becoming a customer. This requires consistent content publishing and monitoring of the website to make sure it is achieving its objectives. It also necessitates routine upkeep to assure that your website operates at peak performance and maximum efficiency.

We maintain the homes we live in and the vehicles we drive. You change the filters in your HVAC units every three months and the oil in your car every 5,000 miles. Your smart connected thermostat and car both receive regular software updates to keep them running smoothly and effectively. You wouldn't even consider letting these routine maintenance tasks go for any length of time because you know the cost of fixing these essential tools can be budget-breaking. You also embrace the fact that preventive maintenance saves time and money over the long term. What's that old adage? "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Having a few safeguards in place before a fire starts is preferable to a lot of fixing up afterward.

How Big is BIG?

Nowadays, the odds are about even that your website runs on one of the popular content management systems (CMS). Content management systems are web-based applications for creating and managing the content of a website. W3Techs is dedicated to collecting survey data to provide information about the usage of various types of technologies on the web. Their CMS statistics focus on the top 10 million websites in the world. The following table shows that WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world. As of this writing, it is used on 28.3% of the top 10 million sites, which W3Techs extrapolates to a 59.2% world-wide marketshare. That's BIG!

W3Techs WordPress market share

Year over year, WordPress has experienced explosive growth while the use of Drupal and Joomla have remained fairly consistent.

W3Techs WordPress gowth rate year over year

Myth Busted: "Set It and Forget It"Set It and Forget It Myth Busted, public domain image from pixabay.com

Who doesn't remember inventor Ron Popeil and his famous infomercials where he immortalized the phrase "Set It and Forget It" as he marketed his creation, the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie. The Ronco website still proclaims it to be the "#1 Selling Rotisserie in the World!" Well, maybe set it and forget is true for a kitchen appliance, but it is not true for WordPress, the statistically proven #1 CMS in the world. Set It and Forget It for a WordPress powered website is a myth busted to such a high degree that it would make the original MythBusters proud!

The WordPress developers maintain a regular release schedule. Major releases are sent out every 6 months. Minor releases are sent out much more frequently, especially when a new bug or security vulnerability is discovered that requires immediate fixing. Bug fixes and security vulnerabilities always leave your site open to compromise. You also have to consider the plugins running on your site. With more than 50,000 plugins in the WordPress plugin repository, not to mention the thousands that are available through 3rd party sources, any number of these are probably providing at least some functionality on your site. Bug fixes and security vulnerabilities in plugins could mean lots of updates required on a regular basis.

Your site's performance, load time, downtime, and uptime, are dependent on WordPress and its plugins functioning as they should in their latest versions. The site's growth, fresh content, analytics monitoring, and design changes, are dependent on making sure all site updates are done smoothly and error-free.

If you don't keep your website up-to-date, it's very likely costing you a lot more than you realize. Potential customers don't want to sit around waiting for websites to load. If someone visits your website and finds something wrong with it, they'll be out of there in a heartbeat; and you may not even be aware that your site is having a problem. How often do you check your site to make sure it's still working? If you are unaware of issues or downtime, you are losing potential customers.

Options: DIY or Professional?

If you're a fan of DIY projects, you've no doubt tackled some of the challenges of maintaining your home or car on your own. At sometime though, you may have started out doing one of those projects and then realized, quite quickly, that you were over your head and needed help from a professional.

Maintaining a website on your own can save you a little bit of money in the short term, but can end up costing you more than ever you imagined in the long term. Inexperience or neglecting critical updates can damage the look and functionality of your site. It can leave your site open to hacking attempts or code insertions that can make your site a carrier for viruses or malware. Your site can even be banned from appearing in search engine results.

If you just updated your site from the WordPress admin area, you have no record of which updates actually took place. Did you make a backup before the update? Plugin and theme updates are known to go bad at times, bringing a site to a screeching halt.

What happens if a problem happens a couple of days or even weeks after an update? Do you have any way of discovering which update caused the problem and how to fix it? At best, it would be difficult to know what changed and how to recover your site without restoring a very old backup. You could possibly end up losing days or weeks of content changes, business records, sales orders, customer contact details, payment information, and the like. Just name it and you can lose it.

Nobody knows your business better than you. Wouldn't it be nice to only deal with what you know best and let the professionals handle what we know best? Would you ever go to court and serve as your own attorney? Of course, you wouldn't! So why try to maintain your own website if you’re not a web professional? When you use an experienced web professional to properly update and maintain your site, you are saving potential lost sales, capturing new visitors, and gaining a competitive edge.

Why Us?

At Victor Font Consulting Group, LLC, we go to great lengths to care for your site as though it were our very own. Before every update, we first backup the site. After the updates are applied, we check the site for any issues. We provide 24/7/365 uptime monitoring and know within seconds whether your site is suffering from any issues. Our website care software keeps a record of updated plugins so if there is ever an issue, we can tell what plugin version was changed and revert back. Our monthly maintenance report includes performance and security scan details. If in the event we ever catch a plugin issue, we address it before you ever know there’s a problem.

If you’re interested in securing a website care contract for your site, contact us to learn how we can keep your site in proper working order. In the meantime, you please take the time to review our care plan options. It's worth the read.

Customize Formidable Forms Email Mime Type

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On the Formidable Forms Community Support Forum, a customer asks,

How do I change the mime type of an email to text/x-gm-impdata so the content can be imported into Goldmine?

Formidable uses the WordPress wp_mail() function to send emails. Unless otherwise specified, the wp_mail function defaults the content type (mime) of any email to text/plain. The function provides a filter that allows you change the content type. The filter is wp_mail_content_type. To change the mime type for all emails, you would use:

Unfortunately, I've tested this and it doesn't work with Formidable. Instead of using the WordPress supplied filter, Formidable hard codes the mime type as 'text/plain' or 'text/html'. Formidable also has an undocumented filter called frm_email_header that we can use to manipulate the content or mime type. If we examine the output of this filter, just prior to Formidable's call to wp_mail, the header contains a three element array that has the following content (as viewed with the Kint debugger):

The value of the third element will either be Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8" or Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8". Knowing this, we can change the mime type prior to the send action. Since this is a simple array, the way to do this is to remove the third element and replace it with the new content type. The code looks like this:

This works perfectly, but it changes the mime type for all emails sent by Formidable. So this needs to be wrapped in code that limits it to the specific form. This also may not work at all if you are using a 3rd party SMTP server such as Mandrill or Sparkpost. When I was testing this code in my local environment, I had Sparkpost enabled and Sparkpost kept changing the content type back to text/html. My recommendation is not to use any 3rd party SMTP sender with this process.

The last step is to wrap the apply frm_email_header filter in a formidable hook that fires after submit but before the email is sent. For this we can use the frm_pre_create_entry hook.

Note that I use form_key instead of form_id. When you migrate a Formidable form to a different environment using export/import, the form id will change. The form key remains static. Using form key will save you a headache tracking down why your code doesn't work after moving to a different environment. Just remember to change the form_key in your code from 'contact2' to the key of your form.

If this all works for you, viewing the email source code will display a header similar to this one:

Restore the WordPress Classic Text Widget

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If you've already updated your site to WordPress 4.8, then you may have been surprised to learn that the Classic Text Widget has been replace with a new Text Widget that uses the TineMCE Editor, the same editor that is used to edit posts and pages. While this is an improvement in that your content can now be displayed as rich text, it is a step backwards because all of the markup we've been able to use in the text widget before is now subject to the editor's code rewriting process, which includes auto paragraph tags and stripping HTML tags. If you never edit the code in your text widget, you'll be okay. The text widget only rewrites your code if you edit the widget's content. This article explains the expected issues with the new widget: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2017/05/23/addition-of-tinymce-to-the-text-widget/

Thanks to Christina Arasmo Beymer, the Classic WordPress Text Widget is available as a plugin. Christina started the work yesterday and uploaded her code to Github. She asked that someone fork the code and finish it up so it can be posted to the WordPress repository, which I've done. While we're waiting for its approval to the repository, you can download the plugin here: Classic Text Widget, or get the source code from https://github.com/vfontjr/classic-text-widget

Also check out Christina's article on how to bulk update the new text widget to the old classic version: https://christinacreativedesign.com/how-to-bulk-replace-the-4-8-wordpress-text-widget-with-the-classic-text-widget/