Release Notes

Star ratings, comments, and a much richer admin

This release adds a proper review/comment workflow (star rating field + a Create Comment action that writes to WordPress comments with aggregate rating meta), five new starter templates with a sandboxed preview iframe on the Add Form gallery, a column-layout container with responsive breakpoints, real-time preview sync in code mode, and a bunch of admin clarity fixes.

Star rating + comments

• New .cf-rating field type — radio-based 1–5 star picker with CSS-mask icons inlined as data URIs (works whether or not the form theme is loaded). Keyboard-reachable with per-star screen-reader labels. Reverse-ordered radios + the adjacent-sibling cascade fill stars to the left of hover/check.
• New Create Comment / Review action — posts the submission as a WordPress comment against a target post (numeric id, [field] reference, or auto-detected via referer URL). When a rating field is configured, stores the value as comment meta rating and recomputes the target post's cf_rating_average + cf_rating_count post meta — Schema-rich-snippet plugins read these keys by convention. Status flips (pending → approved) trigger a recompute via transition_comment_status.
• Code-mode toolbar gains Insert star rating + Insert columns row buttons.

Five new starter templates

| Template | Use | |---|---| | Product review | Star rating + headline + comment, paired with the Create Comment action | | Lightweight comment form | AJAX-submitted drop-in for the native WP comment form | | NPS / satisfaction survey | 0–10 scale + reason + optional email | | Bug report | Severity, browser, steps, attachment — two-column layout | | Product waitlist | Email + company + source, two-column layout |

Template preview iframe

Every non-blank template card on the Add Form gallery now has a Preview button that opens a modal iframe loading the markup via wp_ajax_cf_template_preview. Capability-gated to edit_forms, loads the same forms.css + form-theme.css a real form would use, submit-disabled so nothing fires.

Columns layout container (.cf-row)

CSS helper driven by inline CSS variables — --cf-cols, --cf-cols-t, --cf-cols-m, --cf-gap — sets desktop / tablet (≤1024px) / mobile (≤640px) column counts up to 6 each. Variable chaining means setting only the desktop count cascades to tablet and mobile. Code-mode inserter prompts for the three numbers and drops the wrapper in.

Real-time preview sync

Code-mode textarea now pushes its current markup to the preview iframe on every keystroke (180ms debounce) via postMessage. The iframe replaces #cf-preview-root innerHTML in place. Origin- and form-id-scoped so a cross-form iframe can't be poisoned.

Form editor preview honours the global stylesheet toggles

The admin asset enqueue now conditionally loads forms.css and form-theme.css (with cf_form_theme_tokens overrides) when you're on a form-edit screen, so the visual builder canvas and code-mode iframe both render with the same stack the front-end uses. Previously the editor preview was unstyled even with the theme on globally.

Settings clarity

• Skeleton CSS vs Default form theme — both options renamed with explicit descriptions of what they load. Skeleton (forms.css, ~1.5 KB, structural only — labels, error states, button alignment, the new column-row helper). Theme (form-theme.css, opinionated visual layer — colors, radii, focus rings, typography). Choices are "Load / Skip".
• After Submission — clearer two-way choice ("Show success message" / "Redirect to a URL"). Contextual help appears with the selection. The redundant "Redirect to a page" option was removed; the URL field already covers that case.
• Per-form Settings tab now opens with only the first accordion (Submissions) — previously two opened simultaneously.
• "Add-ons" → "Extras" in Settings + Messages section labels.

Action merge: CreatePost + CreateArticle

The richer CreateArticle (title/content/excerpt mapping, taxonomies, ACF, featured image, author lookup) now claims the canonical create_post slug and the label "Create Post / Article / CPT". Forms saved with the old create_article type are forwarded to the merged handler at runtime — no migration.

Bug fixes / hardening

• vendor/autoload.php require is now file_exists()-guarded so a partial extraction during an in-place plugin upgrade can't fatal the site. Clear admin notice surfaces on the next page load if vendor/ is genuinely missing.
• Template preview wp_die() calls now pass HTTP codes via the response arg instead of as the title. Unauthorized hits actually return 403/400/404.
• CreateComment recompute only fires when a valid in-range rating actually landed as comment meta; out-of-range values skip the recompute.