Announcing Fillable PDFs 3.3

Fillable PDFs for Gravity Forms version 3.3 will be available January 19th, 2022 via auto-update and for download from the Downloads page.

Fillable PDFs 3.3 is largely a maintenance release with various fixes and improvements we’ve been releasing as hotfixes since version 3.2 was released in July of 2021. If you’re opted into auto-updates for Fillable PDFs on your site(s) or have been regularly updating the plugin over the last handful of months you’ve likely already been benefiting from a number of these changes automatically.

We however have a few changes we’d like to highlight that have only recently been included as of the shipping of version 3.3.

Added compatibility with Gravity Forms 2.6

Gravity Forms recently released their first beta of the upcoming 2.6 major version (see how you can grab the beta here for testing on your staging sites).

Our initial compatibility changes for this version are minor and totally presentational in nature, however it shows we’re committed to keeping up on the major builds and changes made to the product we all rely upon in a proactive nature.

This minor change to an icon’s position in the mapper is backwards and forwards compatible which allows us to implement this change now in advance of 2.6 being released.

Added validation to ensure an Owner Password is set when defining a User Password.

We recently discovered that our password validation within the Fillable PDFs feed settings was a bit lacking and wasn’t properly guiding users with certain feed configurations. Starting in version 3.3 of Fillable PDFs, if you attempt to add a user password (which prevents users from opening a generated PDF at all without entering that password) or select custom file permissions to assign to the PDF, the feed settings screen will prompt you to also enter an owner password.

Turns out, setting an owner password is always required in order to either encrypt the generated PDF requiring a user to enter a password to access it or to also set custom file permissions for what the user is allowed to do with that generated PDF. In prior versions we weren’t forcing this via validation which could lead to you wanting to apply a user password or more custom file permissions but not also setting an owner password, this would cause both the user password and file permission settings to not actually be applied to the generated PDFs.

It is possible you may run into some unexpected validation errors if you edit existing Fillable PDFs feeds after updating to 3.3 as all possible file permissions were always selected when a new feed was created in previous versions. If you don’t also have an owner password set on that feed already you’ll see a validation error telling you to set an owner password. For existing feeds there are two ways around this if you just want to keep things as is:

• Set an owner password – Owner passwords simply prevent the user from editing the security settings and assigned file permissions of a PDF within a PDF editor or reader without entering the owner password first. Adding one is unlikely to cause any difference in how the PDFs are presented and accessed by your users. This is the easiest solution and something we would recommend everyone doing anyway.
• Remove all permissions from the file permissions dropdown – As an owner password is required to explicitly set file permissions on a generated PDF, a validation error will be thrown if you have file permissions added to the dropdown in the feed settings. If you don’t care to set these on your generated PDFs, you can remove all of them from the dropdown and save your feed, the PDF generated will be granted unrestricted permissions.

Fixed file dates appearing in UTC time when using List block.

If you’re utilizing our Fillable PDFs Block to display generated PDFs to your logged in users, you may have noticed that the dates and times listed in the block for each PDF don’t respect the local timezone of your WordPress install. As of version 3.3, the block now will display that date and time for the PDF in whichever timezone you have set in your general WordPress settings.

Release Notes

• Added compatibility with Gravity Forms 2.6.
• Added “fg_fillablepdfs_metabox_generated_pdfs” filter to modify PDFs displayed in Generated PDFs Entry Detail metabox.
• Added modifier to format Total fields.
• Added support for mapping to Multi-File Upload fields whose maximum file limit is 1.
• Added validation to ensure an Owner Password is set when defining a User Password.
• Updated replace template file button for improved clarity around intended action.
• Fixed file dates appearing in UTC time when using List block.
• Fixed an issue where templates could not be downloaded with certain custom user capability configurations.
• Fixed an issue with template downloads that could cause query string conflicts with other site elements.
• Fixed an issue with the Fillable PDFs block that breaks the WordPress Block Editor in WordPress 5.8.1 and up.