Hey all,

Last weekend, having semi-recovered from the flu, I released a Form Tools core update that includes a new feature: Client Map filters. Now, when you go to your Edit View -> Filters tab, you’ll notice a few changes.

The old filters have been renamed to “Standard Filters” and there’s a new section underneath labeled “Client Map Filters”. What this new filter type does is let you map the contents of a form field to the values of a client account. So you can now have a single View that shows different information to a client based on whatever values that client has in their user account settings. It’s recommended that you use it in conjunction with the Extended Client Fields module to add custom, “meta” information to client accounts that can’t be seen or edited by the clients.

I’ve documented the feature here. It’s not quite finished, but hopefully it’ll provide enough information for users to use the feature until I have time to finish writing it up.

The Grand Plan

Now that that feature is done, I have one more smaller project to complete (Submission Accounts module update) and then back to “Big Picture” stuff. There’s two things of immediate concern:

1. This Christmas I have a week booked off work so I’m going to update the Form Tools site to archive the old Form Tools 1 content & forum and move ft2.formtools.org to www.formtools.org. Form Tools 1 will still be available for download and I’ll keep the forums open.

2. Language file update. This is long overdue: the mechanism for releasing Form Tools builds is pretty neat, if I say so myself – it’s all automated and integrated with SVN and by and large has saved me weeks and weeks of unnecessary work. However, the language files are still not fully integrated with this process. Namely, whenever a new version includes a change to the language file content, Open Translate (which handles the translations) isn’t notified. The upshot of this is that the language files keep getting slightly out of date. No good!

So I’m going to figure out a way to force communication with Open Translate to update content.

Other than that there are several other language-file-related issues that need squashing.

Once all THAT’s done, I can get back to the fun stuff: module development! I’m thinking an akismet module to tackle the problem of form spam head on…

- Ben