Holler At Me
Continuing the conversion of site components that’s been going on, I just finished up another new plugin for WordPress called Holler. It’s a contact form, one or two of which already exist, but is pretty flexible in what it allows you to do. I much prefer a contact form to having my email address publicly accessible, both because of the problems of spam and abstraction. If you decide to close an email account, your address is still all over the web for people to see and send to. If you use a contact form, you can silently change the address the form links to and nobody will know the difference. Many sites need more than one contact address, so they can different kinds of messages go to different people. Holler lets you specify multiple addresses and gives the user a choice of which address to send it to. You can customise the message strings that it gives back, as well as the way Holler presents it so that it can integrate nicely with your theme. The form elements are marked up so that you can apply CSS stylings as you wish.
Holler is available for the soon to be released WordPress 2.0, and probably 1.5 if you have the SACK toolkit installed. You can find it in the plugins section under holler. Ironically, support for this is best exercised through the comment form on that page instead of through my own contact form! This way other people can see your questions and feedback. This is also my first attempt at localising one of my plugins. There’s only a few strings, so if you have the time and the energy, have a look at the POT file and help me out by adding a new language. I started the ball rolling with a rough Japanese translation. By all means point out my errors!
March 6th, 2006 at 9:29 am
Hi,
The plugin seems to be really good, installation was quite simple, but when I tried to run it, I get a Javascript error about holler_out not being defined.
I checked the HTML source, and there seems to be something wrong as the the Javascript code is intermixed with BR and P tags. I have no ideia what’s wrong, I know other people have the plugin working, maybe it’s something with my configuration, who knows.
March 6th, 2006 at 11:42 am
I’ve seen this reported before, but I’ve been unable to reproduce it myself. What browser and version are you reading in? Do you have a link I could visit?
March 25th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
Hi,
Sorry for the delay, I just happened to stop by here again.
I’ve setup a page where you can see this behavior, but I don’t wanna post the URL here because of search engines.
I send the URL to an email address I found in your forum, if you don’t get it please email me and I’ll give you the URL.
Cheers
April 1st, 2006 at 10:11 pm
Hi Jamie,
I am currently evaluating some Wordpress “contact plugins”. Everyone has its pros and cons and as it seems for now, your’s won because of simplicity. Here are some issues I found and fixed:
1.) I have had the same problem with the Javascript error “holler_out” not found. This is because my Wordpress installation does NOT reside in the webservers root but in /blog. So the code “get_settings(’home’)” must be changed to “get_settings(’siteurl’)” to have the subdirectory appended to the path.
2.) I am missing the option to allow for a subject. I added this and it seems to work perfect. So this may not make it into the next version cause it’s just my personal preference.
3.) As some other foreign guy mentioned (I guess he was from Protugal), the “mail()” function is messing up the character settings (I guess you fixed this with 0.5… BUT). A better way would be to use “wp_mail()” instead. It has the same parameter list and it allows other plugin authors to replace it with their own rewrite. By this, foreign language versions of wordpress are able to do some search and replace on the mail content before sending it to the recipient.
4.) There still are some unlocalized strings in the code. Especially in the Javascript part.
5.) The javascript file should set the header like “header(’Content-Type: text/javascript’);” to mark the generated file truely as javascript. My browser is a bit picky about that.
6.) I am not quite sure about this one, but I guess ‘holler_form.display = “none”;’ is not standard compliant. To have better cross-browser support it may be better to have ‘holler_form.style.display = “none”;’.
7.) I am not very comfortable with having the plugin apply it’s own HTML document structure like defining the form or formatting the error output. For my templates I want to have full control over the generated HTML but will loose it if using Holler. Sorrowly I don’t have a good idea to change this - just a thought.
Anyway, I think this is a cool plugin. Maybe you can include some of the mentioned issues into the next version. Btw: Why are the comments closed on the main post of the plugin?
Hope to hear from you.
April 1st, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Argh, the contrast was a little low. I just read to late that I should post my comment to the support forum. Sorry for that. Feel free to move it.
April 4th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Like this plugin, but the error color coding ain’t working if you use this plugin in a blogpost or on a wp-page. Should be fixed!
May 6th, 2008 at 6:38 am
hi. Thanks for plugin
perfect.
best regards