In the process of creating a new web site for our church, I’m moving to WordPress rather than continuing the custom PHP that I contributed over the years. After figuring out the ServiceU stuff, the next thing to tackle was the Scrip Order form which takes data from a file and generates a form on-the-fly, so back to migrating my custom PHP code into a new WordPress Plugin. As of this writing, I have yet to publish version 1.0 of this, but it’s coming… for now, you can download from here:
http://rinaldo.net/scrip-datafile-form.zip
Installation
- Download scrip-datafile-form.zip from the “download” link on the web page where you’re viewing this or from http://rinaldo.net/scrip-datafile-form.zip (direct download link)
- Decompress the file contents.
- Upload the scrip-datafile-form folder to your WordPress plugins directory (/wp-content/plugins/).
- Activate the Scrip Datafile Form plugin from the WordPress Dashboard.
- You may now use the
[scrip_datafile_form url="./some/datafile.txt" mailto="coord@my-tld.com"]shortcode in a Page.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Why did you create this?
Our church used this form in our old web site and I’m trying to get the same
custom features from WordPress. - What enhancements could be added?
You tell me, I just created this thing. Probably lots of room for options.
This expects a very specific set of columns and data in a specific text format
so it may not be very robust yet. - What does the datafile.txt look like?
There are special lines which start with a # to note the start of the on-hand
section, the break in the on-hand columns, the start of the order-only section, the
break in the order-only columns and the end of the file noting the version
which is normally the date stamp of the original Excel file this data file was
generated from. Below is an example datafile:# on-hand GROCERY STORES Nob Hill/Raley's 4% 25 Safeway 4% 25 SaveMart/ Lucky 2% 25,100 RETAIL STORES American Eagle 10% 25 Bath & Body Works 13% 10,25 # break on-hand SPECIALTY DRINKS Jamba Juice 7% 10 Peet's 8% 20 Starbucks 7% 5,10,25 RESTAURANTS & FAST FOOD Applebees 10% 25 # order-only RESTAURANTS / FAST FOOD Arby's 8% 10 Black Angus 12% 25 Blaze Pizza 10% 25 Bubba Gump 9% 25,100 # break order-only RETAIL STORES ACE Hardware 4% 25,100 AMC Theatres 8% 25 SPECIALTY ITEMS Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf 9% 25 Groupon.com 7% 10,25 Omaha Steaks 11% 25 Overstock.com 8% 25 # 1/28/18 #
- How did you create that datafile.txt in the first place?
It started life as an Excel spreadsheet. I have a Perl script called
scrip_order_to_datafile.pl to do this. It uses the xls2csv program to read
the Excel file, then pulls what it needs and outputs to the text file. The
script will be made available upon request.
Screenshots
Sample form
