Kreg Wallace

Hi Susan.

1.1.3 is the latest version and your shortcode looks correct.

I’m not sure what the “program not found” message was about. I don’t use that statement for any error messages in the plugin.

You can safely place the petition on multiple, distinct pages, but if you display the same petition multiple times on a single page, you may have problems. An example would be if you place the same petition on multiple blog posts and then have a page that shows several blog posts at once. In that case you’d have the same form displaying multiple times on the same view and you might have trouble with that.

There’s no way to display the petition form outside of the post loop currently, but I’m hoping to add a widget for the plugin at some point.

If you wanted to hack at it, doing something like <?php echo dk_speakup_emailpetition_shortcode(‘1’); ?> would display the form for a petition with the id of ‘1’, but it wouldn’t load the CSS or JavaScript necessary for the form to function – and the path back to the AJAX processor wouldn’t be available either.

You could try adding a petition into the content as intended and viewing source to see what CSS and JS get loaded that way and try to rig those into your sidebar somehow to make it functional. No guarantees that this is really possible however ??

Are you wanting to display the petition form in the Admin area? The plugin is designed to only look for the shortcode and load the appropriate JS and CSS files on the public pages of a site. Not sure there’s an easy workaround for this. What kind of luck are you having with the do_shortcode() method?

Hi Josh.

Do you have a petition test page on your multisite installation that I could take a look at? The issue you mentioned came up before as a conflict with another installed plugin, but that issue was fixed. I’d make sure you have the latest version of the petition plugin on your multisite install to insure you have the ‘fixed’ version.

I haven’t done a lot with multisite yet, but I’ll check into this and see if I can find anything that’s going wrong.

Other users have reported a similar problem when using the petition plugin in conjunction with the “Google Analytics for WordPress” plugin. The problem should be resolved in the latest version of SpeakUp! Email Petitions (version 1.1.2) that I released today.

When you fill out the form and press the orange “SIGN NOW” button, the form should submit. The page will not refresh however, since the form is submitted with AJAX – so you will have to have JavaScript enabled in your browser for the form to work. When the form is submitted, the form will change to display a thank you message and buttons for sharing your petition on Facebook or Twitter should appear.

I hope that helps. You can try it out on my demo petition page if you like. That form is working:
https://speakup.designkode.com/demo

Hi Mike,

I just tested this and automatic installation of the plugin seems to be working correctly for me.

If the issue was that the latest version (1.1.1) wasn’t showing up for you in the available plugins list, that’s probably because that update was released only an hour our two before you posted your message. I believe your WordPress installation will only check for updated plugins once every 12 hours.

Glad you were able to get the plugin working through manual install.

Hi Ed.

Signature display seems to be a popular feature request. I’m glad you found a way to make it work for your site. I’d be interested in taking a look at your petition page to get an idea for how people want this signature display to look. It may be something I’ll work into a future release.

Allowing the petition message to be customized causes a conflict with the email confirmation feature that I’m adding. For now, email confirmations are the higher priority. I may revisit making the petition messages customizable in the future if I can think of an elegant way to do so.

The Twitter box on the backend and the Twitter box on the front end are connected. If you enter text in the box on the backend when creating a petition, it will appear in the box on the front end when the petition is signed.

Messages that users customize are not saved in the database. They are simply sent out in the email.

Twitter Message box:
This lets you provide a pre-written tweet for your users to submit to Twitter. After you sign the public petition form, you’ll see buttons for Facebook and Twitter appear. If you click the Twitter button then the message field in the pop-up window will be pre-filled with whatever you entered in the Twitter Message box when creating the petition. You can see this working on my demo page.

Allow signers to edit message:
I plan on removing this option in a future release, so you can safely ignore it. The way it works is if the option is selected and a user edits the text in the petition message textarea, then their customized message will be sent rather than the one you provided for them. If the option isn’t checked, then the contents of the textarea are ignored and only your original message will be sent.

Asshu,

Additional fields:
Not sure if you’re wanting an extra field for country in the public petition form or something else. I made the form field a textarea so I wouldn’t have to mess around with the different international address formats (zip vs post code, should it include a state/prov or not, etc.) and also to simplify the form. It’s important to me that the public form be simple to fill out and not have a large number of separate fields.

The category of the petition is entirely determined by how you categorize the page or post you display it in.

Option to customize the appearance:
You can customize the appearance by setting the petition theme to “No theme” on the settings page and then using your own CSS to style it the way you want. An easy way to do this is to copy the styles out of the plugin’s /css/theme-standard.css into your theme’s style.css file, then altering things as you wish. I don’t plan to implement an appearance editor on the settings page.

Signatures in display:
I may add this one, but it’s a low priority for me at the moment.

Asshu,

I agree that it would be great to have the petition form pre-filled with the contact info of users who are signed in. If this worked, could also skip the email confirmation step for signed-in users.

However, I currently don’t really know anything about how OAuth works or how to plug into that system, so it might take me awhile to get up to speed enough to add this feature.

Some of the other things you mentioned about showing all petitions a user has signed, etc. I might prefer not to add for privacy reasons and adding per-user opt out for this would add complexity. I’ll file this one away and think about it a bit more down the road.

Hey MacItaly.

You can do this currently by selecting the “Do not send email (only collect signatures)” checkbox when creating a new petition. Checking this box will prevent a separate email from being sent out for each signature, but the signatures will still be collected in the database. So, when the petition is complete, you can just download the CSV file of the signatures for your petition and either copy them into an email or use the merge feature in Word, etc. to create a finished petition document that you can deliver however you like.

I’ll consider adding a feature to automate some of that – a click to send a petition mail with all signatures listed kind of thing, but that’s a lower priority for me than some of the stuff you mentioned before.

One issue I ran into when thinking about adding an email confirmation system is that allowing signers to customize the petition message conflicts with the email confirmation. On petitions that require confirmation there would be a time delay between when the petition is signed and when the petition email is sent out. To accommodate this I’d have to store the (potentially) custom petition messages in the database, which I really don’t want to do (a lot of redundant info there!).

Allowing custom petition messages also conflicts with your new idea, as people who customize the message will consider that they have signed their custom message rather than the one you provided and may not want their names attached to the original message.

I think I might just remove the “Allow signers to edit message” option when I roll out the email confirmation feature.

Hi MacItaly,

Thanks for your feedback! Those are some excellent suggestions.

I had considered including an email confirmation system as well as allowing the petition email to be sent to multiple recipients, but I set these ideas aside while working toward an initial release. I’ll try to update the plugin with these features soon. Your post is an excellent reminder of what I need to work on next.