Beta Update for Toolset Plugins – Features, Usability and Stability

   Amir

Announcements

July 24, 2014
27

We are very happy to release beta versions of all Toolset plugins, in preparation for a major update very soon. In this update, all Toolset plugins are improved with new features, better usability, more integration and stability.

CRED 1.3

Like we wrote before, CRED got basically rewritten. It’s not that the old CRED was broken, but this new one is a lot nicer. Fields now include minimal HTML, so that you can control exactly how CRED forms appear in your site. This HTML is fully compatible with ‘simple’ CSS, as well as Bootstrap CSS. As we said goodbye to the Zebraforms library, CRED fields generally don’t need any CSS. Only a few fields, like Skype, require CSS, but basic fields work great with your theme’s CSS. Now, it will be a lot easier to build responsive and well-designed sites with CRED.

Other notable updates in this CRED beta:

  • Fixed issues with repeating fields
  • Fixed issues with email notifications
  • Changed date fields to use a timestamp instead of a string
  • Improved client-side form validation and error messages
  • Improved compatibility with WPML

This version of CRED 1.3 still doesn’t include support for conditional display of custom fields groups. This logic is being added back to the code right now, but not available in the current beta. It will be included and fully working with the final CRED 1.3 release.

Types 1.6

This version of Types looks the same on the surface, but is very different underneath. It shares the same code for the fields library with CRED. Although there are no notable changes for you, this update is important for your sites. As we move forward and add new fields to Types, these fields will automatically be included in CRED too.

As a very positive side-effect of this code consolidation, conditional display in Types is going to become a lot more flexible, supporting any logic that you need.

Views 1.6.2

This update for Views started in low tones and ended with big improvements for you.

If you are using Bootstrap CSS, you will now discover a new ‘Bootstrap grid’ layout mode. This mode lets you easily create grid output using Views, for responsive sites. Choose the number of columns and Views creates the grid structure for you. You can choose between the older Bootstrap 2 and the current Bootstrap 3 markups.

The filters section also received big improvements, making filters fully consistent when you also use pagination.

Embedded Views is getting a very big push in this version. Now, the embedded version will be available as a separate plugin. This will help you deliver ‘hard coded’ client sites and still receive automatic updates to the Embedded Views code.

Layouts 0.9.2

The highlight of this Layouts version is complete integration with Views and Content Templates. Now, you can create and edit Views and Content Templates directly from the Layout editor. No more need to create things from Views and link them to Layouts. Just draw the area and choose Views or Content Template cell types.

Remember the Bootstrap grid support we’ve added to Views? Layouts uses it automatically. When you create a Views Grid cell from Layouts, Layouts automatically configures the cell to use the correct number of columns and style. This way, you only need to enter the HTML for a single cell and everything ‘just works’.

This Layouts version includes over 150 updates and improvements. We will write about all new features in a separate post, so that this post doesn’t become a story.

How to download these betas?

First, obviously, we don’t recommend installing beta versions on production sites. Ever. We encourage you to try beta versions on sites that you are developing right now.

Switching your development environment to our beta versions gives you access to great new features, sooner. Also, it makes your sites more easily upgradable to the upcoming production versions.

These beta versions include many bug fixes and stability improvements. Some of these are minor and some more annoying. Switching to these versions may save you some frustration, running into knows (and fixed) problems. However, as these versions are brand new, they may include new bugs, so please don’t use them in production sites.

To download all beta versions, log in to your wp-types.com account. Scroll to the bottom and you will see beta downloads for all Toolset plugins.

Please note that Toolset plugins should be synchronized. If you want to switch with these betas, please install the beta versions of all Toolset components that you are using.

Schedule for production update

We are closing final work (mainly, support for {{cred-show-group}}). Views 1.6.2 and Layouts 0.9.2 are already after QA. Types and CRED are next. Then, we’ll release all plugins. With your help testing and feedback, we’d like to make this release a great and stable one.

Questions? Ideas? Suggestions? Leave your comments and we’ll get back to you.

 

Comments 27 Responses

  1. Hi guys,
    please tell me that with the CRED refactoring you have accomplished you adopt the worpdress builtin tinymce wysiwyg editor!
    I’ll be really thankful for this!

    Well… actually I’m really thankful for all the effort you put in improving toolset!

    Best regards
    Carlo

    • Yes, CRED’s visual editor now instantiates the native WordPress visual editor. I’m very happy to see that you’re following this development. Have you had a chance to download and experiment with the new beta versions? We’ve keen to get your feedback. Please remember to download the betas of all Toolset plugins that you’re using, as they work together.

      • Really glad to hear this news from you Amir.
        Actually I don’t have tried the betas yet. But I’m really interested in these improvements since I’m working on a really big project involving several cpt and site’s users submission/editing capabilities.

        At the moment the whole thing is at a content design stage but soon it will be time to get in the game with the whole toolset family!

        At the moment the fact that CRED doesn’t use the native wysiwyg editor cause us to use other plugin to manage the submission/editing of blog post, while other cpt don’t need rich text editing feature and where managed trough CRED.

        With this news I think the whole submission/editing process can fall under Toolset management and this is a really GREAT news! Can’t wait to test and, of course, have a stable version of these new releases.

        • The data processing in CRED was already good in current releases, but the front-end display for fields left a lot of room for improvement. This upcoming release should close all these gaps. I hope that you manage to experiment with this beta and give us some feedback. The next update will be a release candidate, so we will be more limited in the changes that we can do before the production release.

          • Hey Amir, one more little request: what about the delete link javascript alert “embedded” on cred? Will them be removed? or at least be customizables?

            • I’d like to make sure that we’re editing what you intend. Can you create a screenshot and show us what you are referring to? You can upload it somewhere and paste the link here.

          • http://begriff.it/alerts.jpg

            Here you can see the alerts are popping out when a CRED delete link is clicked… They are really annoyng.

            Actually there are no solutions to get rid of ’em. So I resolve edit the alert text inside the toolset core file… on the next update I will loose my text edit.

            The best thing should be avoid those alerts at all. If this is not possible at list should be a good thing to be able to edit the alert text.

            Thanks
            Carlo

  2. Does Views 1.6.2 fix the problem with super long SQL queries causing server timeout errors?

    • By design, Views shouldn’t have long SQL queries. This can be a result of specific configuration or what the View is set to load. I would like to first try to help in our support forum. Have you created a thread about the specific situation where you see long queries?

      Also, you should look at what the View is loading using the built-in debugger in Views:
      https://toolset.com/documentation/user-guides/debugging-types-and-views/

      The debugger will show you what the View query does and even how the SQL query looks like. From that, you can see what requires big data loads and you can optimize a lot.

      Tell us if you need help?

      • Amir –

        I have already created a separate thread for this months ago and was told it would be fixed in the next release of Views. Thread: https://toolset.com/forums/topic/server-error-long-query/

        This is killing my site. I have been developing with Types/Views for over 6 months now and don’t know how to fix this. Here is the typical error I am receiving:

        [Wed Aug 06 19:43:12 2014] [error] [client 98.248.88.188] LONG QUERY (1078 characters long generated in /nas/wp/www/cluster-2194/cnsv7g/wp-content/plugins/wp-views/embedded/inc/wpv-filter-query.php:75): SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS wp_posts.ID FROM wp_posts INNER JOIN wp_postmeta ON (wp_posts.ID = wp_postmeta.post_id) WHERE 1=1 AND wp_posts.ID IN (5314,5172,5176,5177,5178,5179,5174,5175,5182,5183,5184,5180,5181,5185,5186,5187,5188,5189,5190,5191,5192,5193,5194,5195,5196,5197,5198,5199,5206,5207,5212,5200,5201,5202,5203,5204,5205,5208,5209,5210,5211,5218,5219,5227,5213,5214,5215,5216,5217,5224,5225,5226,5223,5233,5234,5235,5236,5220,5221,5222,5229,5230,5231,5232,5228,5241,5242,5243,5244,5252,5237,5238,5239,5240,5251,5246,5247,5248,5249,5250,5257,5258,5259,5245,5253,5254,5255,5256,5264,5265,5266,5271,5272,5273,5274,5260,5261,5262,5263,5270,5267,5268,5269,5279,5280,5281,5282,5291,5275,5276,5277,5278,5287,5288,5289,5290,5286,5297,5298,5299,5300,5283,5284,5285,5292,5293,5294,5295,5296,5307,5308,5304,5305,5306,5301,5302,5303,5173,5309) AND wp_posts.post_type = ‘event’ AND ((wp_posts.post_status = ‘publish’ OR wp_posts.post_status = ‘private’)) AND (wp_postmeta.meta_key = ‘wpcf-event-date-time’ ) GROUP BY wp_posts.ID ORDER BY wp_postmeta.meta_value+0 DESC LIMIT 0, 10, referer: http://cnsv7g.wpengine.com/blog/

        I don’t understand what all those numbers are for. There are only 2 posts in the blog! I am using the “pagenavi” plugin for pagination and thought that might be causing the problem. But, I disabled that plugin and still got the same SQL query.

        I know how to use the Views builtin debugger but I don’t understand all of what I see there. Please let me know if you would like me to attach a file with the debug info.

        Thanks,
        Jeff

        • Hi Jeff

          This is Juan, lead Views developer. I am quite sure I know what is causing your problem 🙂 I am reopening the support ticket with new information and a more complete answer.

          Hope it helps.

          Regards,
          Juan de Paco

  3. I just activated Cred beta and got these errors at the top of the page.

    Strict Standards: Declaration of lastviewed::widget() should be compatible with WP_Widget::widget($args, $instance) in /wp-content/plugins/dd-lastviewed/inc/widget.php on line 250

    Strict Standards: Redefining already defined constructor for class GrabAndSave in /wp-content/plugins/save-grab/grab-and-save.php on line 17

    Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /wp-content/plugins/woocommerce-more-sorting/woocommerce-more-sorting.php on line 108

    • Hi Farrel

      By the report of those errors, I would suggest you to open a ticket in our support forum. As far as I can see, they are not directly related to Cred, but maybe there is some kind of conflict. Also, please add as much information as you can to that ticket, like WordPress version used and if you udated anything else along with the Cred beta. It is likely that I will not be taking that ticket from the support forum, so if you can ask the supporter who does it to ping me I will get right away to you 🙂

      From the error log:
      – Both WooCommerce More Sorting and Grab & Save claim to be compatible up to WordPress 3.5.2, and that is a farily old version. The error in Grab & Save seems an internal one (like if something were done twice), and the one about WooCommerce More Sorting seems like a PHP-related thing: something is not declared as PHP likes.
      – DD Last Viewed seems to be compatible with the last released WordPress version, but the error suggests it has any kind of PHP compatibility problem. A fast debug from here tells me that some widget code is being passed one argument when it should be passed two.

      The only thing that might be related to Cred might be the action of displaying those errors. As this is a beta, we have enabled all the error reporting, so both us and you can see whatever problem CRED is causing. If you just want to turn off that error reporting, we can do that by just sending you a patch. Please remember to ask for it on the support ticket.

      Thanks for trying our betas, and please let us know any other glitch that you might find.

      Regards,
      Juan de Paco

    • Existing CRED forms will display with the same functionality and fields, but with new HTML. Instead of the heavy HTML and CSS that characterizes the Zebraforms library, you will get much lighter HTML, which is easier to style.

      If you wrote a lot of CSS that depends on the Zebraforms classes, we will be happy to help you migrate it to the new HTML structure. We want this process to be enjoyable for you and not a punishment. Our support team is getting training on this CRED update right now, so that by the time we launch it, they will be able to help.

  6. Feedback on CRED: DateTime picker works! That is a big help. However, the month and year text on the calendar show up as white or blank so it is not obvious what they are (I don’t think I have any CSS that would be altering that). Also, on WYSIWYG editors the default MODE is Text, not Visual and I think most people would want the visual editor as default. Please fix! Categories and Tags look bad, but I’m not so worried about that for now.

    • Hi Joel

      Glad to hear that you like the way we handle datepickers now 🙂 I am not sure about the month and year text being shown as white or black. Could you open a support ticket in our forum with a screenshot? It would help a lot, so we can fix whatever might need fixing. Also, provide screenshots for the categories and tags issue too. After the beta release we have done some extra work on the layout of those sections, but we should be sure to understand what you mean. IN you happen to have a link to a live site where we can see those issues, it would be even better than screenshots.

      Now, about starting the WYSIWYG editor on the Visual tab, as far as I can see WordPress does not provide a way to do it. WE will put it in our list for exploration, but I can not promise anything.

      Thanks for your input!

      Regards,
      Juan de Paco

  7. I have a Types custom field storing a link to a Download Manager file (e.g. [wpdm_package id=[‘356’]). The previous version of Views would display this no problem in a content template (and the short code would do the requisite formatting. However, in this new beta Views nothing gets displayed, whether I use the RAW option or not, it’s just blank. Any idea why? Doesn’t make much sense to me…

    • Apologies – may be confusing. I’m talking about in the front end when I look at the web page build off a content template. Nothing at all is output from the field containing the short code.

      • Hi Ian

        Sorry for the late reply. I think this should be better handled on our support forum. Could you please open a tcket for this? it would hep a lot to get the exact shortcodes being used, a link to the Download Manager plugin page if possible and any other information that you think is relevant.

        I am sure we will be able to solve this ssue in no time 🙂

        Regards,
        Juan de Paco

    • Hi Oleg

      Yes, we are aware of that request. Basically, when dealing with a parent, you want an easy way to both create new children and assign existing children to that parent. Also, we have other bulk actions in mind on the admin listing screens, to make the post relationships and also to make posts-to-taxonomies relationships easier to handle.

      It will be part of a greater backend redesign on al the admin side of Types, which aims to improve the way you generate post types, relationships, fields and taxonomies. We are still on the early stages of this, and this is planned for the next dev cycle, but I can not give you an ETA. What I can tell you is that this is definitely on our to-do list and something we ourselves would like to have and use 🙂

      Hope it helps.

      Regards,
      Juan de Paco