Hi Tracy,
and thank you very much for your quick reply and useful recommendations.
Your link to the shortcode options was very helpful, as I hadn’t found it yet.
I wasn’t aware of the custom_title, which basically can solve my problem.
After going through close to 30 form plugins, I found your plugin to be the best so far.
So, as a suggestion to make your plugin hopefully even better, let me give you some clarifications on my previous two bullets.
So, from what I understand with regards to titles, your plugin and widget now has Form Name, Widget Title, title=“1” and custom_title.
I still think there are many use cases where, what I would call Form Title is very useful.
- I think your current Form Name should, as the name implies, be an internal name for the admin, to make it easy to distinguish between different forms. The admin may have 10 different forms, where the title could be “Newsletter” for all of those forms. It would then, from the admin point of view, be confusing to set all the Form Name to “Newsletter”. To make it easier, the admin should set each Form Name to something that is explanatory for the admin, and then as you recommend, the admin could instead set the custom_title to “Newsletter”. Which, would solve the problem. However, as soon as the admin wants to update the title, all pages with that shortcode has to be updated. I assume the purpose of the forms is to have a central location where you can change the title in one place and it is then updated on your whole site, and that is where my suggested Form Title would be very useful. The custom_title could still be useful, if the admin wants to override the central Form Title on a single page.
- You are correct that your widget has a Widget Title. Sorry, I was a bit unclear. The Title I would like to be able to enable in the Widget is the one I call Form Title. Even if you don’t implement Form Title, I think it should be possible to have widget-forms that look similar to the shortcode-forms, i.e. make it possible to either use title=“1” in the widget or set the custom_title. Of course you can use the Widget Title, but that title is part of the theme and not your form and so the appearance of the widget-form will differ from the shortcode-form. What I will do currently to resolve the issue, and have uniform forms in the widget-area and post/page-area, is to instead of your widget, add a text widget where I in HTML add your short code with a custom title, e.g. [yikes-mailchimp form=”1″ title=”1″ description=”1″ custom_title=“Newsletter” submit=“Send”]. However, I think your widget would be much more complete and beautiful if you, just like the checkbox for “Display Form Description”, added another checkbox “Display Form Title”, which would enable and show the Form Title in the widget (or the Form Name if you don’t like the idea of a Form Title).
The field I call Form Title, could be an input field below the Form Name in the Form Builder, and it could default to the Form Name when it is empty. Or it could be a Form Field in the Form Fields & Interest Groups-box that you can add to the form, just like any other field.
What I found so beautiful with your plugin is that I can have many forms centrally located, easy to update with immediate effect on my site. That is what a form is for. But to be useful I will now have to use the Form Name as the Form Title, and as I have many forms with the same titles, I will unfortunately have to keep a separate logg of which form is which.
You can consider this support request resolved, but as explained, please consider adding this feature in the future.
Thanks again for great support and a great plugin.
