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Welcome to the blog

We publish the occasional post about LiberaForms in general.

New software releases are also posted here, so we'll be referencing this site as a source of upgrade information.

Thanks for visiting.

Free Form software for all!

 

  • in Releases
  • 1 min read

Version 4.11.1

Just a quick bug fix that prevented site Moderators and Admins from sending new user invitations from mono-lingual sites.

Thanks

To all of you who use LiberaForms.

Enjoy!

  • in Releases
  • 2 min read

Version 4.11.0

This release comes with great news for Chinese speakers, a more robust formbuilder backend, and other goodies.

Localization

LiberaForms has been translated to Chinese! Thank you @poesty ♥

Until now, LiberaForms has used ISO 639-1 language codes like en, es or zh to handle translations.

Because there is a clear distinction between Chinese simplified zh-CN and Chinese traditional zh-TW we have had to rewrite all our i18n backend.

While working on that, we have fixed the translation codes used by the third party libraries formbuilder and parsley.js. That works now.

Localization is now handled with bcp47 codes that represent language, country, and dialect codes. The rewrite was worth it!

Many other languages have also been updated by the team of translators. Much appreciated!

Limited selected check boxes

New feature: When adding a Multi choice field to your form, you can now set a limit to the number of check boxes that can be simultaneously selected by your audience.

Branding

You may have noticed that we changed our logo and icon.

If you would like to update your site's icon and favicon, use the site's look-and-feel configuration UI and restore the default.

Strict form field sanitization

Improvement: When building and saving changes made to a form's fields, we now perform strict sanitization of the field structure. Missing properties are added with default values and unexpected or invalid property values are dropped.

Highlighted bug fixes

  1. Concurrent and orphaned Page breaks are sanitized correctly.
  2. Conditional fields were sometimes failing. Fixed.

Thanks

To the contibutors, the translators, and all of you who use LiberaForms.

Enjoy!

  • in News
  • 1 min read

Confirmation emails

One of the very first features we added to LiberaForms was the possiblity for form editors to include a checkbox at the foot of the form so that their public could request confirmation via email when the form was successfully submitted.

That is a nice feature and many people have uses it over the last five or so years.

But times change.

Version 4.10.0

This is the tenth release in the version 4 series.

Localization

Public facing forms have been translated to Lithuanian!

Thank you @kamiccolo :)

This release also includes lots of i18n updates from the kind translators.

Thank you too!

Optional email confirmation

LiberaForms lets you enable a checkbox so that your audience may receive a confirmation email.

This feature is now disabled by default. Read why

It can be enabled in the .env file.

Bug fixes

Emails

In version 4.9.0 we swapped the email library to fix a bug kindly reported and investigated by @mark-wieczorek.

Unfortunately we did not thoroughly read-the-docs (my bad), and many emails threw an error like, for example, the Recover password email.

This should be all good now. Please update.

Rate limiting

Extra long URL's were throwing an error. Fixed.

Thanks

To all of you who use LiberaForms. Enjoy!

  • in News
  • 2 min read

We've got a new website!

Our website needed an update. It was built years ago and has been pretty much abandoned ever since.

Between then and now the initial idea of a couple of crusading Free software advocates has matured into a project that is used by people from all around the world. What a pleasure!

This gradual consilidation as a free form software alternative has prompted us to build a new website.

Design

Starting a new website with a blank canvas is exciting, but the many different possibilities are also daunting.

A lot can be said for websites built back in the web-1.0, least they be forgotten. They were frank and hyperlinks were plentiful. They were not designed to keep you there. They were simple, static HTML. No dynamic content floating into view or UI effects to distract you, no fireworks. Arrive, get the info, and leave. Not a dark pattern in sight!

Rita Barrachina, a long time friend and collaborator to the project, works with these ideas. She proposes we think back to times when websites just got the job done because that, in itself, is to respect the visitor.

So, our new website lends from 90's, (spinning GIFs and the autoplay MIDIs not included), and incorporates some more modern features like a dark/light theme and small device responsiveness.

Let's see what you think!

https://www.liberaforms.org

Index

The main reason for having a website is to inform our visitors.

We have clearly indexed the site to provide quick navigation and a birds-eye view of the project. Pages are divided into sections, and hyperlinks are used to make the content easily accessible.

Our old logo was functional but not very original (three horizontal lines).

LiberaForms' new logo plays with the letters to create a butterfly, an organic, lighweight and pollinating creature. Just like LiberaForms!

Version 4.9.1

With v4.9.0 we changed the width of public facing forms on large screens.

Unfortunately we neglected to tweak both the form's Thank you page and Expired page.

Upgrade to this version to fix the widths of those pages.

Thanks!

Version 4.9.0

Pleased to announce this release with a mixed bag of new features. 🎉

Editors

  • Individual answers can be downloaded one at a time as PDFs.
  • Forms' expiry date and time now respect your personal timezone configuration.
  • Chronological graphs display dates and times correctly adjusted to your timezone.

Moderators

The new auto-expire form feature can enabled/disabled on a user to user basis.

Admins

When your site is Invitation only a new option Generic invitation link can optionally be enabled.
Anyone with a copy of this link can create a user account.

Sysadmins

Auto expire, auto purge

Form can be forced to expire and optionally, deleted after X days.

See dotenv.example and docs/expire-purge-forms.md for more info.

Rate limiting

This release comes with backend rate limiting.

In version 4.7.0 we added rate limiting on the client, but that was only half the plan.

Sysadmins can now configure limits on public form, and user landing (such as login) endpoints.

See dotenv.example and docs/limiter.md for more info.

User registration honeypots

We've added honeypots to the new user registration form.

Thanks

Thank you @barthalion for diving into the code and building the Individual answer PDF export feature.

Thank you NLnet for supporting in part this release.

Version 4.8.1

We have found a bug that unfortunately causes some forms to fail to render.

With LiberaForms v4.7.0 we upgraded the upstream formBuilder (we like to keep things up-to-date). Then, with LiberaForms v4.8.0 we upgraded again.

To our dismay, we have discovered that unexpected Header and Paragraph field parameters are saved to the database when forms created before v4.7.0 are then later edited by v4.7.0.

Consequently, after upgrading to LiberaForms v4.8.0, these fields throw and error.

v4.8.1 now looks for these rouge fields and repairs inconsistencies in the background, but this only happens when forms are edited or saved.

You should preventively repair the forms on your installation.

Follow the upgrade instructions below and then run

source ./venv/bin/activate
flask site repair-forms

Sorry about that!

Version 4.8.0

We've been busy for the last few months. This version comes with new features and the usual tweaks and improvements.

Multi-page forms

We've built a new field type to insert page breaks into your forms.

Your users will be able to navigate back and forth between pages but only advance when required fields have been answered.

Pages can also be conditioned just like any other field, meaning that fields within a conditioned page are also conditioned!

Inline help

The contextual help code and much of the content has been completely rewritten.

Hopefully you will find the help more ... helpful.

  • Searching for help gives better results
  • Indexing the help pages is powered by keywords
  • New popup windows provide useful on-the-spot information
  • Improved interface to navigate the help pages

Bulk form attachment downloads

It is now possible to download all the files attached to the answers in a zip file.

  • Select which file fields to include in the zip file (when applicable)
  • E2EE files are optionally decrypted

My media

The code that renders lists of data has been extended to list your media files too.

This makes the 'My media' much more responsive.

Bug fixes

Most importantly, the 'Satisfaction' form field now works correctly on the latest version of Firefox.

Thanks

Thank you to the people who contributed code, to all the translators who are amazing, to all of you for using LiberaForms, and to NLnet for supporting this release. ♥

Enjoy!