Wow, what a response to my last mass mail - loads of existing customers want to know when we are making Phil-a-form compatible with Joomla 1.5 - well we have clearly stated on many occasions over the last year that we have no intention of ever making Phil-a-form work in Joomla 1.5.

Shock! - well not really, we have been communicating this fact for over a year to all new and existing customers.

The Good News however, is that we are in the final stages of developing a Joomla 1.5 Compatible version of a forms component unimaginatively called “Joomla Forms” - Joomla Forms will be released inearly 2008 at which time Phil-a-form will be withdrawn from sale.

Customers who have purchased Phil-a-form in line with our stated policies on replacing those components (basically if you purchased Phil-a-form after 00:00 GMT 26th September 2007), will be entitled to a copy of Joomla Forms for free when it is released.

Joomla Forms is not an upgrade to Phil-a-form.  There is no upgrade or migration script, forms cannot be transferred and data cannot be taken from one and used in the other. Joomla Forms is bfFramework powered and is a completely new application for Joomla, it has a huge feature set totally different to Phil-a-form - and will be supported and actively developed for a long time to come (Just has Phil-a-form been).

I often get asked why Phil-A-Form is so popular when there are other competitive products - When I was busy writing a blog post comparing a few of these “free” alternatives I got an email from a customer which gives his honest opinion and saved me completing my own blog post. I have asked permission to reprint his email here - I have changed nothing in it - his own words

Hi Phil,

I should be saying thank you for making a product that really works.
I’ve spend the last 5 solid days trying to get these other Contact type programs to work.

• com_fabrik_1.0.4b Full of bugs and hacks to get even the simplest of things working. Forget using Checkboxes of Drop Down boxes as that done work correctly even with the hacks they recommend.
• RSform! this one is a little better but still has problems and not all the features work. Such as the sending of mail to the administrator. Its sends to the recipient but that’s it.
• ChronoForms V 2.3.4 Stable This one sounded good and started out good but does not send or receive mail and looses the submitted value on check boxes
• Phil Taylor’s Phil-A-Form I read the paragraph on this page where it talks about “This product is only compatible with Joomla 1.0.12 and NOT Joomla 1.5″ and thought bugger. I’m using Joomla version 1.0.13. I skipped over your product 3 times, until I was desperate and thought bugger it I’ll have to try even though its not compatible. Then after buying it I found another paragraph hidden deep in you descriptions that it is compatible with 1.0.13. I WOULD UPDATE YOUR SITE TO CLEAR THIS CONFUSION UP. You will get more sales!!

For me its not about buying products or how much, its about the product doing what it say’s it can do.

I wasted 4.5 days on those other products until I installed the Phil-A-Form and then within a few hours I built 7 submit type forms. I love your product and think its the best and its the only one that actually fully works.

THANK YOU PHIL TAYLOR!!!!!!

Regards,
Gerard Bradford
HITME STUDIOS PTY LTD

The current version of Phil-A-Form is v1.6.3 - and is secure (as far as we know).

We have just been alerted to having a security vulnerability  in VERSION 1.2 (Over a year old!) with SQL injection that allows a hacker to gain the md5 hash of the admin password on a Joomla Site.

We know MANY customers are still running Phil-a-form v1.2 which is vulnerable, in our tests we managed to get information from all the sites tested!

We are also aware that version 1.2 of Phil-A-Form is available on some warez/illegal sites.

Only versions less than v1.2 are vulnerable. PLEASE UPGRADE PHIL-A-FORM if you are not running the latest version.

This is another reason for making sure that all Joomla Components are kept up-to-date!

We are recieving a lot of reports that the Artio SEF Component causes Phil-A-Form to display debug information to the screen above forms.

We have fully investigated this and we are happy to report that the latest version of Phil-A-Form resolves the issue caused by the Artio SEF component. In technical terms, the Artio component is setting the PHP Variable $debug to “true” in the global scope, this is being picked up by Phil-A-Form from the global scope and thus Phil-A-Form displays debug information.

If you are suffering from this, please upgrade to the latest version of Phil-A-Form, or contact the developer of ArtioSEF and request that he removes the $debug=true in the global scope to avoid polluting the scope for other components.

Thanks to the investment made by pilotjourney.com we are happy to release a new version of Phil-A-Form that now supports Plaintext and HTML Emails.

There is now a select box when editing actions that involve email sending, this allows you to choose the appropriate format for the email. You can still use the WYSIWYG Editor to compose your plain text emails, but PAF will remove any html and replace linebreaks nicely for you.

We have also included many more fixes and a few tweaks to the system so that you remain safe and secure

After receiving much demand for a auto incrementing number element, we have developed this feature and can be downloaded from this post.

The element’s value increases every time that the form is submitted, so every submission will have its own unique number. As a added feature you can also set the starting number from which the element starts incrementing.

To install this new element simply extract the attached file and add the autonumber.php file to the /components/com_philaform/elements directory.

Download the autonumber element

We have been concerned for some time with the amount of complaints about emails not being sent from Phil-A-Form forms. 99% of the time the problem has been traced to something other than Phil-A-Form but because PAF used Joomla’s built in Mail Sending system no debugging information was possible without manually modifying joomla.php by Blue Flame in order to get real error messages.

Phil-a-Form v1.6 has now been released to address this concern!

Well now in Phil-A-Form v1.6 we have implemented our own Mail sending system in Full debug mode. As long as your Joomla Global Mail Configuration options are set correctly then there should be no reason for your emails not to be sent - however should there be an error the new version of Phil-A-Form v1.6 will display a lot of debug information (and more on demand!) to aid you in configuring your site correctly.

We have also taken advantage to fix a lot of smaller issues including 2 security XSS issues brought to our attention, for that reason we would strongly encourage all users to upgrade to the latest Joomla 1.0.12 and Phil-A-Form v1.6

Upgrading

Upgrading is dead simple, just uninstall your current version of Phil-a-form and then install this one just as you would a new component - all your forms, data and submissions will be saved and not lost ! Perfect!

We have also opened a sub-forum specifically for Phil-A-Form Email Solutions, please post any reports in that forum.

P.s. We have also introduced a new basic “Uploaded File Manager” in this version to help you manage any uploaded files your form creates…

Now that my cute daughter has arrived I better get back to work and deliver some Phil-A-Form updates as promised…

I’m working hard on getting a Phil-a-form release done soon - the package has just been released to some testers, once I hear back from them I will release it.

Thanks for your patience!

Seems all I do recently is blog about upcoming things Still Baby has decided she wants to hold out on us until Christmas , she is due in two days time, but she (we think its a she!) is still not wanting to brave the cold winds and rain here in sunny Tewkesbury - Christmas Cracker anyone?

Phil-A-Form, Our most popular, and most mature component is about to get a spring (winter) clean! We will be releasing (unless baby decides to mess things up!) a new version of Phil-A-Form this week. We have already done most of the work that we wanted to get done, as well as bug fixing & fixing a single minor XSS flaw, we are happy to announce that we have worked on new features as well (Ok I know I said no more new features but I wanted to give some more life to our aging component

Phil-A-Form 1.6 (1.5 was skipped so as not to be confused with Joomla 1.5) will sport a new File Manager for files uploaded by the forms, as well as greater debugging for Email Sending issues.

We have also closed over 100 bug reports from the bug tracker (Most were duplicates!)

Before this version PAF gave the responsibility for the delivery of emails over to the Joomla built in mosMail functions which did not ever display any warning if an email was not sent.  We have now replicated this function within PAF so we no longer need to rely on mosMail and can generate very specific debug messages relating to the real reason emails are not sent.  This is our current number 1 bug reported which 99% of the time is not PAF’s fault but some other system (Like the mail server not allowing relaying) - so now in PAF 1.6 you will be told if an email was not sent correctly - and exactly the reason why not - good eh ?

So as soon as we have finalised the distribution package - we will release it - so please be patient (This post is written as I have had to mention this new version 7 times already today in email replies…)

I am pleased to report following my last post that I have completed the code required to provide ordering of elements and copying of form elements in Phil-a-form ad have released this code to a select few beta testers.  If the testing over the weekend is fine with no issues I will release a new version of Phil-a-Form (v1.4.1) on Monday 18th September.