Нет войне!

My work as a developer of free and open source software is an expression of my firm belief in humanity, communication and collaboration. War is the opposite of those beliefs and I strongly support any action that opposes Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. As such the protests in Russian cities against the war need to be heard loud and clear and repeated by anyone who believes in dialogue; Нет войне!

Contact Form 7 alternatives

Contact Form 7: trouble right here in volcano city!Given the major change in Contact Form 7‘s frontend JavaScript and the problems having to optimize the JS or cache the page after the update, the question I get asked frequently is what alternatives there are to CF7.
So here is a very quick rundown of 3 such alternatives:

  1. Gravity Forms: premium-only, visual form builder, very flexible, big ecosystem (lots of 3rd party plugins & integrations)
  2. Formidable Forms: has a free Light version, drag & drop interface for building forms, very flexible (we currently use this on autoptimize.com), lots of integrations but smaller ecosystem.
  3. HTML Forms: free plugin from the team that also develops “Koko Analytics” (which I now use on all my sites) and “Mailchimp for WordPress” with a premium addon for extra features, similar to Contact Form 7, no frills, very light on JS so great for performance.

My advice; try HTML Forms if you have rather standard contactform-like forms and you’re not looking for something fancy (which CF7 is not either), try Formidable if you need drag & drop form building or if you (will) need more flexibility/ integrations.

Don’t take free & open source for granted; donate to Mozilla!

Do you ❤️ the free and open web and do you want to ensure a non-profit can continue to play an important role? Do you use Firefox or use MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) to check up on JS or CSS or HTML syntax?
We do too and as from today Optimizing Matters will donate $20 monthly. If you use Autoptimize or Async JavaScript or WP YouTube Lyte then please, pretty please, consider donating at https://donate.mozilla.org too.

Async Javascript: urgent update available

There’s an update for Async Javascript that needs your urgent attention. Update asap!
[Update] I was warned by WordFence about a vulnerability in Async JavaScript that was being actively exploited. Based on their input I updated the plugin to fix the bug. WordFence in the meantime published a post about this and other affected plugins and with regard to AsyncJS writes:

Async JavaScript’s settings are modified via calls to wp-admin/admin-ajax.php with the action aj_steps. This AJAX action is registered only for authenticated users, but no capabilities checks are made. Because of this, low-privilege users including Subscribers can modify the plugin’s settings.
Similar to Flexible Checkout Fields above, certain setting values can be injected with a crafted payload to execute malicious JavaScript when a WordPress administrator views certain areas of their dashboard.

(When) Should you update to WordPress 5.0?

Concerning the very short-notice release-announcement of WordPress 5.0 with Gutenberg for Dec 6th: I’m with Yoast;He has a great “should I update”-checklist and conclusion in this blogpost;

  • Is now the right time to update?
  • Can your site work with Gutenberg?
  • Do you need it?

So our advice boils down to: if you can wait, wait. 

So if you have a busy end-of-year, if you’re not 100% sure your site will work with Gutenburg or if you don’t really need Gutenberg in the first place; wait (while WordPress 5.0 stabilizes with some minor releases).

Taking over Async JavaScript WordPress plugin

David Clough, author of the Async JavaScript WordPress plugin contacted me on March 5th to ask me if I was interested to take over ownership of his project. Fast-forward to the present; I will release a new version of AsyncJS on March 13th on wordpress.org, which will:

  • integrate all “pro” features (that’s right, free for all)
  • include some rewritten code for easier maintenance
  • be fully i18n-ready (lots of strings to translate 🙂 )

I will provide support on the wordpress.org forum (be patient though, I don’t have a deep understanding of code, functionality & quirks yet). I also have some more fixes/ smaller changes/ micro-improvements in mind (well, a Trello-board really) for the next release, but I am not planning major changes or new functionality. But I vaguely remember I said something similar about Autoptimize a long time ago and look where that got me …
Anyway, kudo’s to David for a great plugin with a substantial user-base (over 30K active installations) and for doing “the right thing” (as in not putting it on the plugin-market in search for the highest bidder). I hope I’ll do you proud man!