All Things Seen and Unseen

Some Big(-gish) Changes to the Post Plugins

Since bug reports for the post plugins have dwindled to a slow drip I thought I ought to make some substantial changes in the latest version (2.5b25) and get the flow going again…

In previous versions the {image} tag did its resizing just by changing the <img> tag’s width and height attributes. Now, in addition, it serves properly resized thumbnails.

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Add comment May 7th, 2008

Oops… Ever-So-Slightly Fifty…

It’s not as if you do anything to make it happen but all of a sudden here it is — 50!

So far the day is turning out a lot of fun…

4 comments April 30th, 2008

Feeling So Very Forty-Nine

Wooo hoooo!

2 comments April 29th, 2008

New Beta for Similar Posts Plugin

The latest beta (2.5b22) attempts to address some of the issues users have been running into when upgrading. It fixes various conflicts with various configurations and tries to be give the upgrader as little work as possible. I will be very interested to hear whether the attempt has worked! If you run into problems (new or ones or old) please use the bug report screen under settings | similar posts to let me know.

One issue that I have addressed concerned indexing the blog. In an attempt to simplify matters I have made the initial indexing on first activation automatic and I have brought the index management under the settings subpages as some users found the separate Manage page complicated things.

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Add comment April 19th, 2008

Post Plugins Almost out of Beta

I’ve just published version 2.5b15 of the post plugins: Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments. Thank you to all who have found bugs and especially for those who have tested and re-tested when I couldn’t reproduce the bug myself.

There have been particular problems with the installation of Similar Posts on some systems and with the behaviour of Random Posts as a widget (seems to be a language issue). If anyone has difficulties with these or any other bugs please contact me. The best way is via the Bug Report screen in the plugins’ options/settings pages but a comment or email will do if you remember to give me enough information about your setup to help me debug.

4 comments April 8th, 2008

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…)

1 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