Here’s a few screenshots from the upcoming Submission History module for my Form Tools script. It’s pretty cool – I’ve been meaning to write this for a long, long time, Nice to see it almost out the door. From the module description:

The Submission History module keeps a log of all changes made to form submissions, provides a panel on the administrator’s Edit Submission page to browse the changes, and provides options to restore older versions and undelete submissions.

It’s about 95% written. Now it’s mostly tidying up the code and testing it.

Note: this module will only be compatible with 2.0.3 – and only the latest version (not out yet!). As mentioned in a previous post, the next Core release will move to MyISAM; I’ll be coming out with new versions of all the other modules to ensure compatibility and consistency.

I just completed a rather handy tutorial for Form Tools users.

It checks incoming form submissions to ensure that the incoming information hasn’t already been added in the database. This lets you ensure that multiple submissions don’t get registered with the same email address or username, for example. The actual criteria for uniqueness is entirely dependent on the form content.

http://docs.formtools.org/tutorials/checking_for_uniqueness/

I’ve just finished the first version of a new module for Form Tools, written specifically for a client. Not sure if I’m allowed to say who it is (I suspect not), so I’ll just say that it’s one of the largest companies in the world. Very cool that they’re using Form Tools.

The Client Audit module provides Form Tools administrators with a way to track key events / actions that occur on client accounts, such as when the clients accounts are logging in and out, when they’re updated and what permission changes occur and at what time. This, coupled with a very simple but powerful search tool, provides an invaluable tool for security and auditing purposes.

Read more about the module here:
http://modules.formtools.org/client_audit/

generatedata.com 2.3.8 beta

- Now offers country-specific data for Belgium. Thanks to Kob in the generatedata forums for providing the data!
- the SQL export type now includes a “DROP TABLE” option

See: http://beta.generatedata.com

Form Tools 2.0.3 beta

The main focus on this release is security. 2.0.3 adds the following security options for client passwords (all of these features are disabled by default).

1. Control over the password content: minimum length, must contain upper case char, must contain number, must contain ~!@#$%^&.
2. Password history: prevents you from re-using a recent password
3. Auto-disable an account after an unbroken sequence of unsuccessful login attempts. You can choose the number (between 3 and 10).

See: http://www.formtools.org

The Form Tools project is coming along…! Today I revised the homepage to provide a better introduction to the script. That should get people up to speed on the script and its functionality far quicker than before where they had to scramble around the documentation to get an idea of how it works and what features were available.

Check it out! http://www.formtools.org/

Later I’ll be releasing the final 1.0.0 version of the API and writing a tutorial for someone in the forums.

Then… back to more administrative stuff.

Then… to work on 2.0.1 Beta! :) Life is good!

Hey folks,

I just finished the first draft of a major refactor of Open Translate, a community translation script I wrote a few years back to manage the translation files for Form Tools. You can see the fruits of this on the Form Tools translation site right now:
http://translations.formtools.org/

You’ll notice that there are around 30 completed translations.

Here’s what’s changed:

• Open Translate now uses Google Translate to provide a base set of auto-translations for each language.
• Open Translate now supports a rather beautiful versioning system for the data. This I’m rather pleased with. :) When I come out with Form Tools version 2.0.1, it will no doubt contain added, updated and deleted text to be translated. No problem! I can just create a new branch from within Open Translate. That branch will then inherit all the existing data and translations made up to that point. Versions are a tree structure: any version can inherit the data from one and only parent. The beautiful thing is that (a) there’s zero database redundancy and (b) if you’re translating (or reviewing) something in version 1.5 that hasn’t changed since 1.0, your work will be inherited by all versions that use the data. Neat, hey? Every hour, all updated versions-languages are automatically exported to the Form Tools site for downloading by the end user.
• I significantly simplified a lot of the database for features that I originally thought would be useful, but didn’t turn out to be. For example, languages are now tied to projects rather than individual versions, as are data categories.
• Translators can now sign themselves up for the project via the Form Tools site rather than manually contacting me.

Anyway, fun day. Should be interesting to see how things go from here on out.

- Ben