CFDB now on github.com instead of wordpress.org

CFDB has transitioned off of WordPress.org to GitHub.com. You can still used CFDB but to you must do a 1-time setup to make WordPress see the plugin and its updates in GitHub instead of WP.org
  1. Download the latest release from CFDB Releases on GitHub
  2. Uninstall CFDB if you have version 2.10.29 or earlier
  3. Install the new version of the plugin via your WP plugins page by uploading the downloaded file
  4. Similarly install the GitHub updater plugin by downloading its .zip file and uploading via your plugins page.
Once done, you will be able to update CFDB like normal on the plugins page. Behind the scenes, the update now comes from GitHub.

Plugin Tutorial

Video Tutorial courtesy of Rose Apple Media. Thanks!

More in-dept tutorial with screenshots

Avoiding “_wpcf7” Fields

February 10th, 2012 13 comments

For Contact Form 7 Users: a recent update of the Contact Form 7 plugin seems to have added several new meta fields to form submissions. These automatically get saved by the CFDB plugin. If you look on the Database page in your administration panel,  you will see extra fields associated with new submissions:

_wpcf7,_wpcf7_version,_wpcf7_unit_tag,_wpnonce,_wpcf7_is_ajax_call

You may view these fields as unwanted clutter.

To avoid saving these fields, go to the Database Options page,  and paste the list of fields in the following:

 

Update

Since regular expressions can now be used in this field, you can achieve the same effect but putting in this:

/.*wpcf7.*/,_wpnonce

 

Categories: tips, troubleshooting Tags:

Computing Percent of a Subset of Form Data

November 6th, 2011 Comments off

This is an example of a user-defined short code that I helped someone create and I thought it would be a good one to share.

My new friend Gillian created a web site to track Polio survivors currently living in Australia (http://www.polioaustralia.org.au). Visitors to the site can register and provide information about themselves. Gillian is capturing these submissions into her database using this plugin. She then wanted to add some graphs showing statistics on the data.

Specifically, she wanted to compute some percentages. Example: of those people who contracted Polio in Australia, how many were contracted in New South Wales?

The first thought would be to use the cfdb-value short code with function=”percent”. But cfdb-value does not give her what she wants. The issue: The calculation needs to exclude those people who contracted Polio in a different country (Those people made form submission because they are now living in Australia).

So we turned to creating our own short code. In this short code we want to first select only the subset of form submissions that indicate a case of Polio contracted in Australia, then determine the percentage of those that were from a particular state (e.g. New South Wales).

But we can do better; we created a general “percentage-of” short code where we can select those entries that constitute the total for the denominator, then count those that match the sub-criterion for the numerator (state=New South Wales in this case).

The approach to getting the total (denominator) is to use plugin’s “filter” capability to select the relevant entries (In this case, Polio cases contracted in Australia). Then in the code of our user-created short code, we loop through those results and count those that meet our sub-criterion (state=New South Wales), compute and output the percentage.

The short code placed on the page looks like this:

[percent-of form="Polio Register" filter="Overseas=N" field="PolioStateTerr" matching="New South Wales"]

Here, we used the built-in  form and filter short code attributes to select the entries of interest for the denominator (those from the register that are not overseas i.e. Polio cases contracted in Australia). Then we add two new short code attributes that our user-created short code PHP will need to handle. These are field and matching for the numerator.

The PHP for the short code is the following. You may wish to use this code since it can be applied generally.

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require_once(ABSPATH .
'wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7-to-database-extension/CFDBFormIterator.php');
$exp = new CFDBFormIterator();
$exp->export($atts['form'], $atts);
$total = 0;
$count = 0;
while ($row = $exp->nextRow()) {
    $total = $total + 1;
    if ($row[$atts['field']] == $atts['matching']) {
        $count = $count + 1;
    }
}
$percentNum = 100.0 * $count / $total;
$percentDisplay = round($percentNum) . '%';
echo $percentDisplay;

The key element is in lines 9-10 which resolves to checking if a form entry’s PolioStateTerr field’s value is equal to the value “New South Wales”. If so, we increment $count. At the end we compute the percentage using $count/$total.

Categories: shortcode, tips Tags:

How to Filter on relative time

October 10th, 2011 Comments off

As of version 2.2, you can filter by relative time to capture things like “since last week”

[cfdb-table form="Contact form" filter="submit_time>last week"]

Read more

Categories: notice, shortcode, tips Tags:

Call for language translations

February 17th, 2011 Comments off

Do you use this plugin in a non-English website? You can help create a translation of all the English display text in this plugin to your own language.

You do not need any technical knowledge. I have set up a page to take you step-by-step on what you need to do to contribute a translation. Click here for steps on how to create your own translation.

You may notice that the text on the data table on the Database admin page has text already translated into your language. But if it is not, there is another quick translation that you can contributes. Click here for making a translation of Data Table text.

I (and I’m sure others) greatly appreciate your contribution!

Categories: notice Tags: