All Things Seen and Unseen

How to Give Your Plugin Settings a Submenu

While rebuilding the posts plugins for WordPress 2.5 I became frustrated by the excessive length of their settings pages and more than a little envious of other plugins which managed to split their settings into subpages accessible from a submenu.

I pored through more opaque code than is comfortable and eventually decided I should try and build an easy, reusable solution. Here’s the end result (download code): (more…)

Add comment March 27th, 2008

Novice Notes on the Official Wordpress Plugin Directory

As I’ve said I’ve been wrestling with the plugin directory and, as I suspected, the trouble is down to my lack of smarts. Two things to be aware of if you are wanting to host your plugins at the official site:

• When they say that you should name your tags/releases using only numbers and periods they mean it. I was using 2.5 bxx not thinking a space would cause an issue but of course it did when the automatic updater kept giving up on the zip files it downloaded. From now on, 2.5bxx until I can drop the beta designation.
• That stray space thing managed to keep hidden for a few days because I couldn’t even get that far. I’ve been grumbling that my installation instructions were not showing correctly and trying, in vain, to get help… well, a little while ago as I was poring over the readme.txt for the umpteenth time I was struck by lightning (OK I’m exaggerating) and thought to check the encoding of the file. I don’t know how but the readme.txt files I’d uploaded were encoded as utf-8. The Readme Validator hadn’t caught the problem but it was enough to make the directory ignore the files.

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2 comments March 25th, 2008

Once

I saw the film ‘Once‘ tonight. Very moving. Here’s a clip with the Oscar-winning song.

Glen Hansard - Falling Slowly

I don’t know you
But I want you
All the more for that
Words fall through me
And always fool me
And I can’t react
And games that never amount
To more than they’re meant
Will play themselves out

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice
You’ve made it now

Falling slowly, eyes that know me
And I can’t go back
Moods that take me and erase me
And I’m painted black
You have suffered enough
And warred with yourself
It’s time that you won

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you had a choice
You’ve made it now

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you had a choice
You’ve made it now
Falling slowly sing your melody
I’ll sing along

Add comment March 24th, 2008

Still Fighting the Official Plugins Directory…

I haven’t got a response from the official WordPress plugin directory to work out why the proper instructions are not displaying and meanwhile I am getting a lot of folks wondering what on earth is going on and why the post plugins are no longer working.

Here are some emergency directions for the interim…

First follow these links to download the latest versions of Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, or Recent Comments. You will also need a new copy of the Post Plugin Library which is now configured as a plugin.

Load stuff up to the plugins directory (you will notice that some of the folder names have been changed to accommodate the requirements of the WordPress folks) and activate as normal. The library should be automatically activated when any of the other plugins is activated.

Hopefully after all this hullabaloo future updating will happen smoothly and automatically (wishful thinking!).

Please get in touch if you are still having problems. The report-a-bug option under the settings menu is a helpful way of doing so … or just leave a comment.

Add comment March 24th, 2008

WordPress 2.5 and Automatic Plugin Updates

Update: Check out this post for some extra instructions.

Well I’m wrestling with the new ability of WordPress 2.5 to notify when a fresh version of a plugin is available on the official directory. Up until now I haven’t used the directory but today I tried to get my post plugins up and running over there so that the automated update functionality could be used.

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2 comments March 23rd, 2008

Site Outage…

Apologies for the mess the site has been in for the last 18 hours. A mangled .htaccess file (who knows how?) made the site inaccessible and then to compound problems I was locked out of ftp so I couldn’t put things right.

Add comment March 20th, 2008

WordPress Plugins Updated: Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments

Finally! I have posted the updated (2.5) versions of my post plugins and they are full of enhancements and even the odd fix… Check them out from the plugins page but please take note:

• They are still beta releases and, given the number of modifications I have made, I am sure I will have a few issues to correct. If you have any problems try reporting them through the in-built bug-reporting tool. Other comments are, of course, welcome on each plugin’s own page.
• The plugin code has been substantially refactored to minimise duplication and, as a result, the four plugins now share a library. Please take care to read the upgrade directions rather than blundering ahead (the way I usually do myself!).
• If you have been using the Plugin Output Cache you will need to update to the latest version.

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23 comments March 17th, 2008