Musings on an Assortment of Subjects

Over the past couple days Steve McMahon has been with us at the ONE/Northwest Seattle office, and we’ve been working on a number of improvements to PloneFormGen. With the involvement of several other Seattle-based Plone developers who often join us for open source work on Friday afternoons anyway, we had a small army working on PFG.

Faced with a long list of good ideas, we decided to focus on the relatively easy changes. We’ll try to get these through beta to a final release fairly quickly so that we can move on to more interesting challenges like a revamped form editing UI, multi-page forms, and no longer storing fields as Archetypes objects.

Sprint accomplishments:

• Andrew Burkhalter finished converting the installation over to GenericSetup (work begun by Jesse Snyder at the sprint in DC)
• I merged a branch I’ve been working on which adds support for rendering PFG forms from another template, viewlet, or portlet.
• Steve McMahon cleaned out some compatibility code for Plone 2.1 (which will no longer be supported except in the 1.2.x maintenance series)
• I created a proof-of-concept of a recaptcha integration which we plan to ship with PFG. This needs more work though.
• Steve added an option to the mailer to select which fields will be included in the e-mail, as well as an option to exclude empty fields.
• Steve removed the restriction on which fields can be used as the mailer recipient.
• Jon Baldivieso added a link spam validator to ensure that a field doesn’t contain links.
• Steve switched the default view of form fields to the edit view, to save a few clicks when building forms.
• Steve added CSS ids to the rich label field.
• I fixed up the test infrastructure to work with roadrunner, and added some basic integration tests.
• Andrew made progress on his branch which will add a form import/export feature.
• Paul Bugni added an e-mail validator that support multiple e-mail addresses.
• Alex Tokar and Fulvio Casali almost finished implementing an option to make a field “server side” only, which is like a hidden field that doesn’t actually render for the client (to avoid the chance of hacking hidden fields).
• Steve added a BCC field override setting.
• Jesse Snyder fixed a bug where copied-and-pasted action adapters were not automatically activated.
• Michael Dunlap removed the isUrl validator from the form action override, so that it’s possible to use relative URLs.
• Elliot Cohen joined the fun even though he’s new to Plone, and reviewed PFG documentation.
• I added a ‘force SSL’ option for form folders which will redirect to an https:// version of the form.

Thanks to everyone who participated, including those who responded to my previous request for voting on features!