I just posted a minor upgrade to wordpress.org for Koumpounophobia, which fixes a CSS display issue with the dialog editor. Also, Koumpounophobia and Post-to-Post Links II now include Russian translations, thanks to Fatcow. And Deko Boko has a new Italian translation, thanks to Raneri web design.

And while I’m here: Shashin was one of five image-related plugins (out of the 285 available at wordpress.org) listed in the Weblogs Tools Collection’s article Five Image Related Plugins for your WordPress Site.

(My blog has been quiet recently as I’ve got a big home renovation project going. I’ll post pictures when it’s done. I may not have the opportunity to blog much this month.)

New in version 1.2:

• You can have Deko Boko load its stylesheet only on pages where you use the Deko Boko contact form, so it won’t be loaded unnecessarily on other pages.
• Localization support: a dekoboko.pot file is included to enable translations to other languages.
• If you want to make a custom contact form, a template is included to get you started.
• If you want to customize the dekoboko.css stylesheet, you can place it in your active theme folder, and Deko Boko will find it there (that way you won’t lose your stylesheet customizations when upgrading Deko Boko).
• Uninstall option.
• Uses a nonce field for additional security.

You can download Deko Boko from wordpress.org.

Important note to upgraders: you will need to deactivate and then reactivate Deko Boko after you upload the new files. Also, the contact form now uses a nonce field for additional security. If you have made your own contact form template, you will need to add a nonce hidden input field, like this:

<?php wp_nonce_field('dekoboko_nonce', 'dekoboko_nonce'); ?>

Update 5/12: I’ve released a bug fix, version 1.2.1. It fixes an installation bug: Deko Boko wasn’t installing properly if you didn’t already have the WP-reCAPTCHA plugin installed. It will now install correctly with or without WP-reCAPTCHA already installed.

• I’ve completely rewritten the XHTML and the CSS for the contact form. If you’re upgrading, and you’ve customized your contact form, you’ll need to migrate your changes. The reason is that the widely used CSS “clearfix” code that I had in Deko Boko breaks in IE7 (I know, I’m late in catching this – I’ve switched to Ubuntu on my laptop and I wasn’t keeping up with the latest Microsoft nonsense). For reasons explained in my rant below, this pushed me to do a full rewrite, which simplifies both the markup and the CSS.
• One of the features of Deko Boko is that is it plays nicely with WP-reCAPTCHA (the official reCAPTCHA plugin for handling spam in comments). The latest version of WP-reCAPTCHA changed the name of the WordPress option variable where it stores its API key, so Deko Boko now looks for it under the new name and the old name.
• I added a language selector to the Deko Boko settings menu, so you can choose a language other than English for the reCAPTCHA widget.

<rant>The challenge with writing a plugin like this is keeping both the XHTML and the CSS at a level where you don’t need to be a coding guru to make changes yourself. I want the Deko Boko contact form to be customizable by people with beginner-to-intermediate level coding skills. But there are a multitude of variations in how CSS is implemented in different browsers, not to mention the things that are just plain broken. Nowhere is this problem worse than forms. So developers are often forced to choose between doing semantically “incorrect” things in their markup (like using br tags to force certain layout effects), or writing hundreds of lines of complicated CSS, often with filters to deal with incompatibilities between browsers.

Unfortunately the solution for the IE7 “clearfix” problem I mentioned above breaks clearfix for IE6 (requiring an IE6 filter to then fix that). IMHO clearfix is a hack to begin with, needed to deal with an oversight in the CSS model. And in any event, the code needed to fix the problem for definition lists was way too fragile for a plugin like this, which is meant to be flexible and extensible. So I dropped the definition list in favor of an ordered list, following the techniques described in Cameron Adam’s excellent article on form layout. His approach to form layout is the best I’ve seen, with some clever yet simple approaches to the markup (the right word is “elegant” – as it’s semantically correct too) to get around some of the most common problems with form layout. It’s also such a well written and highly detailed article, that I can simply refer you to it if you want to extend the layout of the Deko Boko contact form to suit your own needs .</rant>

• A selector for using different reCAPTCHA widget themes, as well as support for custom CSS for the reCAPTCHA widget.
• Support for multiple, custom contact forms.
• “CC Me” option for users to receive a copy of the message they submit to you.
• Protection from cross-site scripting attacks.

See the Deko Boko page for further details.

Important note to upgraders: you will need to deactivate and then reactivate Deko Boko after you upload the new files.

1. It uses reCAPTCHA for blocking spam. reCAPTCHA is a great project that uses data from its captcha form submissions to help digitize books.
2. The Deko Boko contact form can be extended any way you want, but without the need for complicated admin menus. If you’re comfortable editing HTML, then you can add any number and any type of input fields to the contact form. You can control which fields are optional or required. When the form is submitted, any fields that you added will have their data included in the body of the email.

The form layout is controlled by a CSS styled definition list, which provides a great deal of flexibility. With just a few CSS edits you can change the position of the field labels to top-aligned, left-justified, or right-justified.

Spam protection in addition to reCAPTCHA is also included. Deko Boko protects against email header injections and will verify that the return address provided by the user has a valid format.

This is a beta release (v0.8). I’ve been using it on my own site for some time and it’s working well. I’d like to hear feedback before making it an “official” release.

Go to the Deko Boko page for more information and to download it. Note that comments are turned off on the page – please submit any comments on this post.