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Enquiry and Contact plugin 0.1a

February 16th, 2007 | 21 Comments | Posted in plugins

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Download 01aAfter a lot of work, I am proud to announce the release of version 0.1a of our Enquiry and Contact form plugin.

Plugin Aim

This plugin is designed to be an easily customisable and extendable method of creating an enquiry form for a rental property website (or any website that allows users to enquire about date periods), or even just a standard contact form.

Features

The plugin is feature packed from the outset, as well as the following list we have also added a large number of hooks and filters so that other plugin developers can easily extend it.

  • Choice of Ajax powered or Standard HTML forms (Ajax form degrades to standard form when javascript is disabled or not available).
  • Drag and drop functionality to add, remove or reorder fields on the form.
  • Easily specify required fields, and change field title/description.
  • Can send customisable email to enquirer.
  • Can send enquiries to administration email address with customisable subject and message.
  • RSS feed of enquiries (can be based on search criteria. e.g. easily build seperate RSS enquiry feeds for each property).
  • Web-based enquiry management panel to allow you to view the last 10 enquiries, or search based on enquiry status (New or opened), time of arrival, property or full text search.
  • Delete unwanted enquiries easily.
  • If the Booking and Availability plugin is installed, you can easily create a pending booking (will check for other bookings that conflict with enquiry dates).
  • Enquiries are marked up with hCard and hCalendar microformats for exporting to other calendars and address books (tested with Operator and Tails Firefox plugins)
  • Use builtin CSS styles for form, or switch off styles so you can use your own.
  • Option to include Javascript libraries on All pages, only Pages containing a form, or remove them from all pages (if you have them included in your theme already)
  • Uses Yahoo YUI javascript libraries for Ajaxy goodness.
  • Parses form content for various exploits such as Mime encoding, script injection and a whole lot more.

Installation and setup instructions

Instructions on installation and setup will be added soon and will be found on this page once completed.

A sample form will be found here.

Please ask any support questions in the new Forum.

Changes to plugins admin menu layout

February 11th, 2007 | No Comments | Posted in plugins

I have had to make the decision to move the administration menus for our plugins to alternative locations.

I initially thought that adding a high level menu in the Wordpress administration area would be the best approach, as it would keep the property management functionality completely separate from the day to day Wordpress functionality.

Unfortunately, this posed problems with assigning seperate security levels to the setup of the plugins by the site administrators and the use of the plugin by booking staff (you needed to have full admin rights to access the top level menu).

As I can not find any way around this (if someone knows better than me, please let me know), in the next release of the plugins I will move the setup of the plugins back to the Options menu, and the day to day screens for the plugin to the Manage menu.

If anyone has any other ideas, or suggestions I would be happy to hear them.