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[Mike Walsh]

A while back Google changed the structure of the HTML that they use to render Google Forms. This new version of Google Forms is not compatible with the Google Forms plugin.

Fortunately, there is a solution. Google offers the ability to downgrade a form to the prior version of Google Forms. Doing this makes the form compatible with the Google Forms plugin and everything works as expected. There are posts on my web site, here and here, which explain the background and solution.

Will the plugin support the new (current) version of Google Forms? I hope to one day but I can’t say for sure. The HTML is the new version is very different and for some unknown reason Google chose to stop using HTML input elements (the standard tags for radio buttons, check boxes, etc.) and instead uses DIV elements which they tie to Javascript.

There is quite a bit of work to do to support this new version of Google Forms and I am not sure if/when I will get to it. In the meantime, use the downgrade option to continue using the Google Forms plugin.

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wpgform/

[Mike Walsh]

There is a new feature in Google Forms (v0.87) which will check the Google Form URL to ensure the HTML includes the expected syntax. If the syntax is missing, an error will be displayed on the Dashboard when defining the form. This check is performed on save.

[pbergqui]

I really appreciate this plugin. Is it still under development, or are you leaving it as is? What I would like to see, is a possibility to supply data for some elements from within my logged in user context. Typically, this would be the user and name. Do you think this is something you may add in near future?

[Mike Walsh]

I am fixing bugs when they come up and at some point I’d like to figure out how to support the new version of Google Forms.

Have you looked at the placeholder functionality? You can already do some of what you are asking to do.

[lullabyman]

An utterly fantastic plugin, Mike! Thanks! It took a while for me to get it the way I want … afterwhich I did the following quickstart guide for me … thought it might be useful for others:

1) Add and Activate the “Google Forms” plugin in WP

2) Create the form in Google docs
– When creating the form in google docs, go to the bottom of the create/edit webpage and click on the question mark, then select “use old forms”. You’ll know if you’re using an old form if at the top of the edit page it has a wide button to switch to the new form (which you should ignore).
– Don’t put anything in the “Form Description” field since it doesn’t do HTML. Instead, you can add that in your WP webpage using nicer formatting, above where you’ll put the shortcode.

3) Edit the form in Google Docs
– deselect “Require [google-user] login to view this form” at the top
– deselect “Show link to submit another response”, at the bottom
– Click “Addons” menu item, then “Email notifications for this form”
– – Just select all the defaults
– – When adding rules, leave the options blank for the first rule, then “Create rule”t. – – You will then get an error about needing to pay for premium features. Ignore it.
– Copy the url for the edit-form page for the form, which you’ll use in the next step…

4) “Add form” in the Google forms plugin in your WP site:
– In the plugin’s setup page for the form (“Google Forms” – “Add new”), where it asks for the form url don’t use google’s viewform url, but the google url for editing the form (the viewform url did not work for me)
– Make the “Confirm url” is the homepage. It’s where the browser goes after submission success.
– First Try Style: Redirect
– Type something in for the alert, like: “Thank you for your submission … we will get back to you as soon as possible.”
– Form caching is on
– Select “Flush the transient …”
– For Captcha, I try not to use it, and it hasn’t been a problem

5) Place the shortcode in the webpage.
– The shortcode will be something like this: [wpgform id=’128′], you will see this in the plugin’s list of the form setup pages which you created.
– Then make sure the new setting has taken effect by visiting the page. Depending on page caching it may not show up yet.

NOTES:
– Don’t expect that the “viewpage” link (which is shown in the wordpress plugin’s setup page for the form) will work… it may return a 404 error.
– The email notification with the data does *not* come from the plugin. It is defined in google forms, menu-item: Addons – EmailNotificationsForForms
– When you test the new webpage that it will include your widgets if you don’t change the page layout from default. Make sure your widgets look right (no “hello world” posts for example). Remember that your default widget content (example: footer) will show “Replace this content … blah blah blah” junk unless you you actually put something in those widgets, in the Appearance – Widgets settings

[lullabyman]

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[Andreas Andrews]

Unfortunately, Google (G-Suite formerly Google Apps) support have confirmed that the ability to downgrade/revert to the old version of Google Forms is deprecated which renders the plugin no longer usable, unless it is made compatible with the new Forms.

Does anyone have any suggestions, recommendations or workarounds?

The only way I currently know to embed forms is to use the embed feature to drop the HTML from Forms directly into the WordPress text editor when creating a page/post, which isn’t a very elegant method. Alternatively I will have to look at using an alternative form builder. Thanks for any thoughts & responses from anyone.

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by Andreas Andrews.

[Mike Walsh]

I guess this was bound to happen at some point. There is no work-around that I know of at this time. I have an idea of how to fix it but as I’ve stated a number of times, it will take a fair amount of work to do it. Unfortunately prioritizing this over my real job responsibilities isn’t possible so my time to work on it is limited. That said, I’ll see what I can do – no promises though.

[mica123]

Does this mean that we won’t be able to use the plugin we have set up and configured with the old forms? I sincerely hope that we can continue with them as they are.

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by mica123.

[Mike Walsh]

I don’t know. I would imagine existing forms will work as they always have but the ability to create a new form and then downgrade it will go away.

[mica123]

Thanks for the reply – very much appreciated. But at the same time I very much hope you’ll be able to fix it – we very much depend on it.

[victorbargains]

I was able to set up an old form to work with this plugin this week. I tried first with a new form, saw the error, and then tried to downgrade that form. The ? button in the bottom right corner had the “Switch back to old forms” option greyed out.

BUT, I was able to create a new form, and before adding any content, immediately clicked the ? button and found that “Switch…” was now enabled. So, if the first thing you do after creating a new form is revert it to old forms, then this plugin should still work great.