Busy busy busy. Despite one rather dumb mistake in Form Tools 1.4.2 (file overwritten by accident), the release appears to have been generally successful. It’s great to finally weed out those bugs.

Besides that, I just got another gig with 1-800-GOT-JUNK, which I’ll be starting on as soon as I wrap up Boston Pizza and Probono Maps. Plus the Salvation Army and Beyond Petroleum gigs are creeping up fast. Erk. The moment I’ve finished this, I’m going to get that darn Boston Pizza stuff done.

I’ve also started looking at the Flash Image Scroller code again. I want to add vertical scrolling – it’s by far the most important improvement to work on. A lot of the code is already there, but I need to make a few modifications to allow for different text positions (underneath, to the right), which would be reasonable requests for vertical scrolling. Flash really is neat.

Here’s a quick update on where we stand with Form Tools these days.

Form Tools News

Language Packs

I’ve managed to find a little time over the last few weeks to sketch out the Translation Management software for the language pack version of Form Tools. Right now it’s very much in an early phase, but the database has been designed and a few of the pages written. Permitting versioning for the translations is proving to be quite the task, so I may have to scale back my original plan. The issue is, I want to be able to “freeze” translations for each version so that you can always go back and download the translations for an older version. So basically what we’re talking about is designing a fully functional CVS for translations. It’s an interesting problem.

Next Version (1.4.3)

As with the previous version, I’m going to continue focusing on bugs and minor improvements. The bulk of the problems that have arisen have all been solved in 1.4.2, but a couple remain – and at this point I can afford to be nit-picky and fix up those tiny little pending issues.

Small issues aside, there still remains the Bane Of My Existence: the dreaded blank email bug. I have a solution which I think will fix it on significantly more servers. For the more technically inclined, here’s the rub: Form Tools currently sends all email content via the 4th parameter of the mail() function: the headers. This was done since some emails are sent in both HTML+text, so you need to demarcate the end of one email type to the other. Sending the info via the headers should allow for this. I was under the impression that all servers allowed for this. Hah! Fat chance.

So, I’m re-writing it to only use that methodology for the HTML+text email format. For the single-format emails, it will use the standard email content parameter (the 3rd).

Tutorial on PayPal integration with Form Tools

I’ve written something like a quarter of it. It should be REALLY handy once it’s completed. At the rate I’m going, I should be finished by, ooh, 2013.