v2.05: Floating Labels, GDPR Compliance, and Better View Compatibility

Learn more about the new features released this week, and how they affect your WordPress forms. Check out the new floating labels and GDPR compliance features.

Earlier this week, version 2.05 of Formidable was released. It includes some great new changes and a huge batch of fixes. Let's start with the good stuff.

Modern floating labels for beautiful forms

A few weeks ago, Nathanael wrote a blog post about how to create beautiful forms in WordPress. I looked through all the examples others have added in the community Showcase, and found some truly beautiful forms. But after a closer look, I realized I couldn't include all of them in the blog post examples because they included custom styling. Now that won't do!

Formidable v2.05 includes a new label position to help eliminate some of those customizations. It automatically inserts the field label as a placeholder inside the field. When the field has a value, the field label fades in above the field. Take a look.

To use the floating labels option, go to the Formidable -> Styles page, and change the label position to "inside". Alternatively, open the field settings for a field and set the label position to "placeholder inside the field."

Read more: Beautiful contact form design in WordPress

Repeating fields with limits

Have you ever wanted to set a limit on the number of rows that can be added in a repeating section? Happy Friday! Open the field settings for the repeating section field, set your limit, and you're good to go. Also note: if your Add buttons don't disappear when you reach the limit, you may need to go to the Formidable -> Styles page and hit update.

This feature comes to you from Laura, a first-time contributor to Formidable. You may have been lucky enough to meet her in the help desk. Keep an eye out for more from her.

Easier GDPR Compliance for your forms

By default, Formidable saves a bit of information about the person submitting the form. This includes the page they submit from, browser information, and IP address. When an IP address is saved, you have the option of preventing someone with that IP address from filling out the form a second time. But the upcoming rules for GDPR compliant forms require those in the EU to provide consent before personal information is being saved. If the consent is not included in your form, IP addresses shouldn't be saved.

Formidable v2.05 includes an option on the Formidable -> Global settings page to not save IP addresses in your forms. Now you can collect completely anonymous form submissions for surveys and polls and still comply with the GDPR changes.

Read more: How to make GDPR Compliant forms in WordPress

Improved View compatibility

When you create a view, other plugins need to interact with its content. If you use a page builder plugin or a membership plugin with content restriction, you may have run into conflicts with your views. We've entirely rethought the way this is done to minimize conflicts. This also prevents double filtering that was happening on shortcodes (including forms) inside some views.

However, it's also possible you will see some side effects. When you insert a view on a page and include filter=limited, this allows other plugins to interact with your view. If a plugin runs on the_content filter, it may no longer have an effect. For example, some PHP type of plugins use a custom format to know what content should be run as PHP. If you are using a plugin like this, you'll need to find the line like this:
add_filter( 'the_content', 'the_plugin_function_name' );

We've made a couple more changes to the filter shortcode option for v2.05.01 (not yet released). v2.05.01 will return the functionality of filter=1 to its original state before v2.05. If you aren't using a plugin that requires filter=1, we recommend using filter=limited when you see double filtering or odd interactions with other plugins and themes. v2.05.01 is planned for release later today.

One more added shortcode option (courtesy of Laura), allows you to open a link to a file in a new tab. The new_tab=1 shortcode option adds target="_blank" to your file links.

Enhancements to the frm-show-entry shortcode

The frm-show-entry shortcode can be used in a number of different ways. When used in PHP, it can return the entry in an array or json format. Now you can also set array_key='key' to use the field keys in the returned array instead of the default field IDs. We use this in our API addon too.

When you use this shortcode to show HTML, there are several color options including text_color, border_color, and bg_color. These color options are no longer limited to hex colors. They also accept word colors like 'red', or '#fff' instead of only 'ffffff'.

New hooks

• frm_before_entries_table hook to display extra content before the entry listings on the Formidable -> Entries page.
• frm_entries_list_query hook to filter queries for the entries shown on the Formidable -> Entries page.
• frm_lookup_is_current_user_filter_needed filter to allow the options in a lookup field to be conditionally limited.

This covers the main highlights of this release, but there's more if you'd like to see the full changelog.

To update to v2.05, go to your WordPress Plugins page and hit update.