News

Roadmap

Possible future features:

    • Optional redirect people to another page once they have signed
    • Display signatures as a comma delimited string rather than line by line implemented in 1.4.2
    • Move widget thank you notification to bottom of widget
    • Include AJAX check to see if email address has been used before when it is entered i.e. before submission (under consideration)
    • One click to send multiple petitions   declined – open to abuse
    • Additional custom fields (under consideration)

As an example we would like to have someone sign our petition, but then tell us 2 more fields (their age), and maybe a group of checkboxes of the sports they play since we are using the “petition” more of a “sign a pledge” functionality. Would be excellent to be able to get these 2 bits of meta data to help in our reporting.

 

  • BCC petition to self (implemented 1.3.1)

More language translations

The translations were a bit of a mess.  Some files were named wrongly so didn’t work.  Some phrases were missing.  And, to be honest, I had no idea how translations and WPML (Word Press Multi Lingual) worked.

But I soon discovered that it is difficult to update translations or add new ones…especially if you don’t speak that language.

So I purchased poedit and I have to say that while not quite a breeze, translations are now manageable.  The biggest hassle is when I add or change a string, I have to update, check, compile and upload each individual language file.  So I won’t be doing that too often.

So far there are:

  • Dutch nl_NL (Kris Zanders)
  • Finnish fi_FI
  • French fr_FR
  • German de_DE (Hannes Heller, Armin Vasilico, Andreas Kumlehn)
  • Hebrew he_IL (Oren L)
  • Italian it_IT (MacItaly)
  • Norwegian nb_NO
  • Polish pl_PL (Damian Dzieduch)
  • Romanian ro_RO (Web Hosting Geeks)
  • Russian ru_RU (Teplitsa)
  • Slovenian sl_SI (MA-SEO)
  • Spanish es_ES
  • Swedish sv_SE (Susanne Nyman Furugård @sunyfu)

If your language is missing and you are willing to check over what I provide for glaring or humourous mistakes, use the contact form.

Version 1.3.5

There has been an issue that took a while to track down where petitions wouldn’t display despite there being a shortcode on the page.

Thanks to  Tobias author of another plugin.  Working with Steve from Florida he noticed a non breaking space being inserted in the example short code in the list of plugins.

Instead of  [emailpetition id="2"], what people were copying and pasting was [emailpetition id=”2″] which is a special space that looks like a normal space but acts differently in a wordpress plugin.

Knowing the problem, it was a really simple fix that was worth pushing as an update on its own.

When support kicks in

In case you aren’t aware of the history of SpeakOut!, it came from a plugin named SpeakUp by Kreg Wallace.  It was a good plugin but Kreg seems to have abandoned it and he can’t be found.

The plugin needed some touching up after no updates in 4 years so I took it on, renaming it to SpeakOut! to keep them separate while acknowledging the origins.

That was in 2015 some time.  Every once in a while I tinkered with the plugin to make changes I wanted and all was quiet.  I never pushed an update.

Then one day in April 2017 I discovered that there is a support forum and life changed for me and the plugin.  There were dozens and dozens of support requests and bug reports that I had no idea existed.  I tried to go back through them but it was too hard if they were more than 6 months old.  But I did manage to solve some issues and now am looking after the plugin actively.

Here is what happens to downloads when you finally release updates 😛

speakout

Version 1.3.1

 

  • Added option to BCC self
  • Changed admin option from “Allow custom messages” to “Allow message to be edited” for clarity
  • If admin option “Allow message to be edited” is checked, on the petition top section the text will change from “READ THE PETITION” to “READ OR EDIT THE PETITION”
  • A few typo fixes as I dig deeper into the code