News

Possible future features:

• • Add an email share button to share  “I signed this petition”.
  • Redirect to a specific page after submit
  • Optional display custom message with signatures implemented in 1.4.3
  • Optional redirect people to another page once they have signed
  • BCC petition to self implemented 1.3.1
  • Option that address fields be required
  • 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.

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.

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 😛

Apologies.  When copying the contents of a file from my development site to my code repository I accidentally copied the contents of one script into another similarly named script breaking signatures.

Version 1.3.2 was released within 24 hours and fixes this.

• 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

I broke the widget in version 1.2.0 and haven’t been able to repair it.  So I have rolled back a couple of versions and am rebuilding the changes.  I’ll also be managing version control a bit better in future 😛

Version 1.3.0 should be out before the end of the month.