Posted on

Wonky Submit & Print-Pro-Matic Button

This is a Dr. Frankenstein experiment with Contact Form 7’s Submit button and the Print-Pro-Matic Print external trigger. When the user clicks submit, the form should also force-launch the print dialogue. Years of working in UI tells us NOT do this, but people still have music playing on page load, so what do we know.

[contact-form-7 id="1018" title="SubPrint"/]

To cross-breed the Submit button with the print-pro-matic print trigger, just follow the following steps.

  1. In the form: add a cf7 submit/print button, and assign it a unique ID (in this case subprint) and a class of printme_trigger like so:
[submit id:subprint class:printme_trigger]
  1. In the post that the form shortcode is displayed on: simply target the form to be printed and assign the external_trigger attribute the id of the external print/submit button:
[print-me target="#wpcf7-f1018-p2316-o1i" external_trigger="subprint"/]

Update: Submit & Print With Validation

The above will work nicely if there is no validation to consider. However if we only want to print the form after it has passes validation we need another approach.

First: We will not actually have the print triggered via clicking the submit button, so we can remove the id and class in the submit tag in the form:

[submit]

If the submit button does not trigger the print what will? If you notice in the Contact Form 7 edit page, there is an Additional Settings tab. Here we can use Contact 7 own on_sent_ok: to trigger the print like so:

on_sent_ok: "print_trigger('my_print_trigger');"

Now, finally, we must provide an ID to our hidden print-me shortcode:

[print-me id="my_print_trigger" target="#wpcf7-f1018-p2316-o1" external_trigger="on_sent_ok"/]

Demo

deactivated due to spam abuse.
[contact-form-7 id="1018" title="SubPrint"/]

Posted on

Print-Pro-Matic Advanced External Triggers

There are times when it would be nice to turn ANY element into an external print trigger. This is a feature often asked for when trying to hook up a Visual Editor button to be a print trigger. As of Print-Pro-Matic v 1.1.4e we have added:

  • new printme_trigger class that turns anything into a print trigger
  • new external_trigger shortcode element to enter the id or ids of the element(s) that should be used as an external trigger

And this is how it works:

First we need an element that has a unique id. There must also be the ability to add the printme_trigger class to it.

<button id="my_button" class="printme_trigger">Print</button>

Next we add the print-me shortcode like normal… but also add the external_trigger attribute like so:

[print-me target="#intro_text" external_trigger="my_button"/]

And that’s it! Note: The external_trigger attribute can accept a comma separated list of multiple id’s. Also: When an external_trigger attribute is assigned, no standard print-pro-matic icon or text will be displayed, as the external trigger will be used instead.

Posted on

Print-Pro-Matic Inject Logo Before Print Element

This is a quick test to inject a logo at the top of a print-pro-matic page using only css.
In this case, the print element has a class of #post-2182 and it is targeted as normal:

[print-me target="#post-2182"]

However now we add the following css to the our theme:

@media print {
   #post-2182::before {
      content: url(https://spacedonkey.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/ninja_turtles-300x223.jpg);
   }
}

This will place the logo in the ::before pseudo class of the targeted print element on the print page. however if the images does NOT exist on the page then it will not have enough time to load before print is triggered. Let’s try it out:

[print-me target="#post-2182" pause_before_print="500"/]

Probably now image right? Now click the print icon again. Image. How to solve this?

Guess we need to use top_html and bottom_html to define custom content and provide a bit of pause_before_print time.

Posted on

Print-Pro-Matic External CSS Test

Print-Pro-Matic allows loading in an external css file for the print view, rather than have to manually entered all definitions in to the Custom CSS area.

For example, this should load in a css file that gives the target element a lovely purpley dotted border:

[print-me css_url="https://spacedonkey.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/purpeat.css" target=".purpeoeater"]

Flyin’ Purple People Eater

Well, bless my soul rock ‘n roll flying’ purple people eater
Pigeon-toed under-growed flyin’ purple people eater
One-eyed one-horned it was a people eater
What a sight to see!