OMNINOGGIN

Last week I reviewed Vladimir Prelovac’s WordPress Plug-in Development Book: Beginner’s Guide.  Today I would like to give the book away!

How to enter

You will only need to do two very easy things to win:

1. Follow @madeinthayaland on Twitter and stay followed until at least the end of the contest.
2. Tweet about this contest using the following text:
   

   Just entered a contest to win V.Prelovac’s “WordPress Plug-in Development” Book. Win by following @madeinthayaland and RT! http://is.gd/s7iM

When does the contest end?

This contest will end on April 17th, 2009, 11:59pm EST.  I will be announcing the lucky winner in the morning of April 18th, 2009.  Good luck everybody!

Sponsor

This contest is sponsored by Packt Publishing, publisher of WordPress Plug-in Development: Beginner’s Guide.

In this post, I would like to highlight a good tutorial I recently wrote on Weblog Tools Collection in case you guys have missed it.

The tutorial shows how you can easily hack your WordPress blog to highlight search terms using some jQuery magic.  I particularly like this method because it is an easy modification and jQuery will let you highlight any text within any HTML element no matter if the text is in the post title or in the post content area.

Read the full article here.

When I told one of my friends that I am reading Vladimir Prelovac’s WordPress Plug-in Development (Beginner’s Guide), I got the following response from him:

Just what we need… more beginners developing insecure wordpress applications. As-if it isn’t already the #1 hacked application on the Internet…

I completely disagree with this statement.  A book like this will help the WordPress community more than harm it.  Everybody has to start somewhere right?  How else better than to start with a beginner’s guide that shows you the proper way to code a WordPress plugin (with security in mind)?  I have finished reading this book and I am quite excited to share some insights. Read on…

As a quick tip, one of my readers, Luciano Passuello, suggested a great Firefox Add-on called refspoof for testing WP Greet Box WordPress plugin.

Upon installation, you get another address-bar-like toolbar that you can use to type the referrer URL to spoof.

If I enter something like “weblogtoolscollection.com” into the bar and press enter, I get the the same page with the added referrer info. Because of that, my wonderful WP Greet Box plugin properly displays the Weblog Tools Collection banner:

I think the WP Greet Box administration interface already does a great job at displaying what your greeting message will look like, but it is always good to be able to see it along with the rest of your theme.

WP Greet Box version 4.9 is here!

What’s new this release?

This version of WP Greet Box has the following enhancements.

1. Added the ability to keep displaying the greeting message until after the user clicks close for the first time. After that, the greeting message will not show up for that user anymore.
2. Added support for icon links so icons are now clickable.
3. Fixed default CSS display for when the greet box is too long compared to the greeting message.
4. Fixed PHP cookie writing outside of place bug in PHP mode (Thank you Daniel from Bonetree Blog!).
5. Fixed cookie bug in PHP mode (causes message to show up too often).
6. Fixed some XHTML stuff.
7. Fixed other minor bugs.

Read on…

This post will explain the various options in WP Minify WordPress plugin.

Basic Options

Enable JavaScript Minification

When checked, all JavaScript files will be extracted from the HTML output and be minified and served as one compressed JavaScript file.

Enable CSS Minification

When checked, all CSS files will be extracted from the HTML output and be minified and served as one compressed CSS file.

JavaScript files to exclude from minify

You may specify any patterns for excluding any Javascript files from the Minifying process. The entries are line delimited so if you specify:

prototype
wp-greet-box/js
googlecode.com

Then the following Javascript files will not get included into the Minifying process if it’s being enqueued via wp_enqueue_script():

• http://example.com/wp-includes/js/prototype.js
  (matching first rule)
• http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-greet-box/js/functions.js
  http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-greet-box/js/onload.js
  (matching second rule)
• http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery-1.3.2.min.js
  (matching third rule)

CSS files to exclude from minify

Works the same way as the “JavaScript files to exclude from minify” option except that this field will filter out CSS files.
Read on…

You should use this tutorial if you still notice some Javascript and CSS files not being processed by WP Minify after activating the plugin.

Problem

WP Minify only sees scripts and styles enqueued via the wp_enqueue_script() and wp_enqueue_style() function. So if your theme or plugin does not use these functions for printing Javascript or CSS references, then WP Minify will not include them into the Minifying process.
Read on…

photo credit: Magnus.

After the release of WP Minify and the many months supporting my other plugins (such as WP Greet Box), I am feeling quite a bit burnt out. Because of that, I am sadly announcing that I am discontinuing support for all of my WordPress plugins. I realize how important some of these plugins are to you guys so I have actually recorded myself on my web cam talking about why I have made this decision. Please hear me out in this video.

More reasons about why I’m doing this.

photo credit: om nom nom

I posted an article on Weblog Tools Collection about the top 10 characteristics of a great WordPress plugin.

10. Easy Installation
9. Seamless Upgrade
8. Uninstallation Option
7. Meaningful Error Messages
6. Localization Support
5. Intuitive Admin User Interface
4. Reset/Import/Export Options
3. Optimized
2. Secured
1. Good Support and Thorough Documentation

Read the full article here.

WP Greet Box version 4.8 is here!

What’s new this release?

This version of WP Greet Box has a few minor enhancements.

1. Added support for non-cache-compatible mode for people who do not use this plugin with any caching plugins. If you do not use any cache plugins, I recommend disabling cache compatibility so you do not get that load “bump” when jQuery dynamically loads the greeting banner above your post text.
2. Added option to disable JS references for manual JS management.

Read on…