RSVPMaker WordPress Plugin

This is an RSVPMaker customization you can add or modify if you wish to present headlines with an excerpt from your event description, which was one of the requests from the blog. If I ultimately add this to the plugin, I’ll change the shortcode and function names to avoid clashing with this version.

Along with a few bug fixes, version 2.5.4 removes the PHPExcel library required for the export to Excel function, which will now be available in a separate plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rsvpmaker-excel/

Bundling that code library in really bloated the download for the base RSVPMaker plugin. While this is a useful function, I decided it made more sense to let the people who take advantage of it download that separately.

The actual working of the export to Excel function is unchanged, once you have both RSVPMaker and RSVPMaker Excel enabled.

There is a checkbox in RSVPMaker that lets you specify that the names of the attendees and any note they entered in the note field should be displayed publicly. This works with a function in rsvpmaker.pluggable.php that you can override using the advanced customization method for modifying the plugin behavior with your own PHP code.

Here’s a sample custom function, created for someone who said he wanted to be able to show the content of a custom RSVP form field, which in this case includes the name of the roommate someone had chosen for a trip.

function ajax_guest_lookup() {
if(!isset($_GET["ajax_guest_lookup"]))
return;
$event = $_GET["ajax_guest_lookup"];
global $wpdb;
$sql = "SELECT * FROM ".$wpdb->prefix."rsvpmaker WHERE event=$event AND yesno=1 ORDER BY id DESC";
$attendees = $wpdb->get_results($sql);
echo '<div class="attendee_list">';
foreach($attendees as $row)
{
?>
<h3 class="attendee"><?php echo $row->first;?> <?php echo $row->last;?></h3>
<?php
if($row->details)
{
$detailsarray = unserialize($row->details);
if($detailsarray["roommate"])  {
$roommate = htmlentities(strip_tags($detailsarray["roommate"]));
echo "<p>Roommate: $roommate</p>";
}
}
if($row->note);
echo wpautop($row->note);
}
echo '</div>';
exit();
}


RSVPMaker finally has its first international translation, thanks to some help from Jarosław Żeliński, a consultant who has been working with the plugin. Here is what the editing panel for setting dates and RSVP parameters looks like in Polish:

Note that there are a couple of English language phrases showing through where no translation has yet been supplied. I actually just got received an updated version, which will be included with the next RSVPMaker release.

I’ve been getting interest in translation and occasional offers to help since RSVPMaker was first released, but Mr. Żeliński helped me work through a series of issues ranging from proper encoding of international characters to bugs in the code that was supposed to load the translation files. Now that we’ve got this first one, it would be good to see translations to some other languages.

I’m still new to this whole process, but here’s essentially how it works:

• Obtain a copy of POEdit the utility used to generate translation files in a standard format.
• Use POEdit to open the rsvpmaker.pot file, which is a template for the catalog of translated phrases you will create from English to the target language.
• Save your file as rsvpmaker-locale.po where locale is a standard country code. Example: rsvpmaker-pl_PL.po for Polish. See http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_in_Your_Language 
• Use POEdit to suggest translated phrases to be used in place of my English language ones. For content to be available for translation, it needs to be marked correctly in the plugin source code, so let me know if you see important omissions. I’ve tried to flag most of the labels and instructions for translation.
• When you save your work, POEdit will also generate a .mo file such as rsvpmaker-pl_PL.mo. You can upload this to your own server to test that it works, with the language code set in the WordPress wp-config.php file. If you believe you have created a translation others would find useful, send me the .mo file to include in future distributions of RSVPMaker.
• When I put out a new release, you should be able to use the Update from Sources function in POEdit to detect if there are new words or phrases available for translation. Send me the updated .mo files as appropriate.

For a general tutorial on translating plugins, see http://urbangiraffe.com/articles/translating-wordpress-themes-and-plugins/

If the instructions I’ve supplied aren’t clear, let me know how I can improve them. Thanks.