WP-Members 2.6.2 announcement

WP-Members 2.6.2 is in final testing and should be released today, should all go well.  This is primarily a bug fix release, although there are a few feature improvements as well. 

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug in the legacy login form that prevented the password reset from functioning correctly.  For those that are interested in details, this was a result of a single missed line of code from when the dialog functions were changed to return a value rather than immediately echo their result.  A hidden field containing the form submit action was not being added to the return string.
• Fixed a bug that caused a checkbox that is set to be checked by default to remain checked when a user updates their registration information even if the user unchecked it (sounds confusing, doesn’t it?).  Although the correct value was stored in the database (checked or unchecked), and shown on the admin side, the user wouldn’t necessarily know that and would continue to see the box checked, possibly thinking that the setting hadn’t changed. This now maintains an unchecked state if selected on the members area when the user updates their information.

That’s it?  Only two bugs?

Yes, just two were found and they were relatively minor.  This code has been around quite awhile and is fairly robust, folks!  On to the improvements in this release.

Feature Improvements

Display certain fields only to the admin:

I had a user ask about the fields that are selected as not displayed not showing on the admin side.  That got me to thinking, why not show them for the admin?

Originally, all installed fields were there in the list. I hadn’t added the add/delete options until 2.6.  That meant if you didn’t want a field to display on the registration, you turned it off with the display toggle.  Now that you can add/delete your own fields, there is not a need for this in the manner that it was initially intended as you can just delete the fields you do not intend to use (except for the WP native fields).

But why not be able to use this for additional information that only the admin sees?  The functionality was mostly there anyway.  Just a few tweaks to the admin code file and – voila! – a new feature.

Now if you select a field to display, it will show on the front end registration form.  But if you need additional data fields on the admin side only, uncheck the display option for that particular field.

Created checkboxes can be updated to be checked by default or not:

With the addition of the add fields feature, I hadn’t really considered updating whether checkboxes were checked by default or not.  With the feature release in 2.6, you determined if a checkbox would be checked by default or not when it was created, but this could not be updated.  You would need to delete that checkbox and create a new one with the same values to change to a different checked by default state.  So I added an update for the state of a checkbox to the field management panel.

Keep tab active when updating plugin settings:

With the new features of the field management panel, it became quite apparent that making a lot of changes in one of the secondary tabs would become very annoying after awhile since any time you submit changes, the first tab (the plugin options) would become the active tab.

I made some changes to the admin code and the javascript so that it will remain on the tab that you just submitted edits for.  So if you are working on the fields tab and making changes and/or adding fields, it will remain on that tab.

How to upgrade:

The 2.6.2 update is available via wordpress.org so you should be able to upgrade via the plugin admin panel in your WP installation.

As always, it is recommended that you try any new release in a test environment first!

You can download the update directly at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-members/