It is my pleasure to announce that I will be joining my development efforts of Project Honey Pot Http:BL plugin with Jan Stepien (the original developer of Http:BL). Jan has already merged my changes onto the Http:BL plugin which can be found here. I will no longer be updating Project Honey Pot Http:BL. I have been spread a bit thin lately so I welcome this partnership. I have a long features list for the Http:BL plugin, but just haven’t had to time to implement them. Make sure you stay tuned to see how well this plugin turns out!
I think this version of WP Greet Box is ground breaking enough to bump the version up to 4.0. To be honest, the reason version 4.0 came out so early is because I just found out 3 days ago (via Google Alerts) that I have a new competitor, Referrer Detector, written by Phan Van An. He seems like a really nice guy (he mentions my name repeatedly in the post), but he could have at least contacted me about co-authoring before forking the code 
. With that said, I checked out Referrer Detector and decided to implement some of its wonderful changes in WP Greet Box and expand WP Greet Box to be able to work with WPMU (Thank you Andy Beard for your suggestion).
What’s new in this release?
I’ve been quite busy with life lately, so I haven’t paid too much attention to my plugins. Good thing I had a whiff of inspiration today so I decided to add a few enhancements to WP Greet Box.
What’s new in this release?
I’ve been quiet for the past week for many reasons, but the most important reason is that I’ve been working on WP Greet Box version 3.0. It turned out that there we so many positive responses (and feature requests) on the WP Greet Box plugin that all I could do is work on it whenever I get the chance (at coffee shops, during lunch breaks, before sleeping, etc). It sounds tiring, but it was all worth it!
What happened to version 2.0?
I silently released version 2.0 after adding the ability to add your own custom greeting messages per referrer URL.
What’s new in this release?
This release has cookies support so now we do not keep showing the same message to returning visitors. I also added a configurable default message to show when no referrer match is found.
Where do I download, file bugs, make feature requests, comments, and suggestions?
Please visit the original plugin post.
WordPress 2.6 was officially released yesterday so I upgraded this blog immediately. Here are some things you need to know about WordPress 2.6:
- New features in WordPress 2.6
- Plugin authors should read over PlanetOzh’s quick tutorial on how to make your WordPress plugins WordPress 2.6 compliant and upgrade their plugins. This shouldn’t take too long at all. I have already updated and released NowThen Photo Display and AJAX Force Comment Preview. As always, please notify me of any bugs that you run into via the comment form on these plugin pages.
Social Homes Widget is a small but neat little plugin that lets you add links to your various social homepages in your sidebar. Of course you can do this manually, but it’s a lot nicer to be able to manage this in the widgets section in wp-admin instead of having to dive into your sidebar.php every time you want to modify the list.
The plugin supports 19 different social home links. This is more than enough for most people, but not me. Today I found that I needed to add my Plurk homepage to this list. So I found a quick hack to get this done fast, instead of submitting a request to the author. All I did was: Read on…
I’m sure everybody now knows that the iPhone 2 (3G) is going to be released on July 11th, 2008. I asked a buddy if he would prefer to wait for the gPhone over the iPhone 2 and he humorously responds:
“too unproven”
“too designed by committee”
“like open source”
“don’t want no open source microwave”
“don’t want no open source phone”
“try to make food in open source microwave you find out you need to compile the dependencies for popcorn separately first”
WordPress, being an open-source software, is the most popular blogging platform out there. Why is this? Because it addresses the average Joe’s concerns of open-source software.
Read on…
Lester Chan (GaMerZ) has released the his ‘Wave 2‘ of plugin updates. One of the plugins updated was WP-PostViews. I’m happy for this release since he was able to incorporate the mods I did to WP-PostViews and made it elegant and public for everybody to use. Although I probably won’t be getting as much traffic for my WP-PostViews mod anymore, I learned a lot from making this and a couple other plugins cacheable. Hopefully I will continue to make contributions of this magnitude to the WordPress community in the future. Kudos Lester!
Alex King’s ‘Articles’ is a great plugin that lets you easily mark posts as featured articles. You can also display a list of featured posts on a selected page/post by placing a “###articles###″ tag in it. That said, there are TWO big problems with it:
- It doesn’t work with WordPress 2.3.x or 2.5.x
- It displays the same article in each category that the post is listed under. So that means if your featured post is filed under 5 categories, your post will show up 5 times on your featured articles list.
Andy Cowl has already resolved issue #1 on this WordPress support thread (THANK YOU!). Here are the changes Andy Cowl did.
+++ articles.php (working copy) @@ -96,13 +96,11 @@ $cats = $wpdb->get_results(" SELECT $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id, $wpdb->terms.term_id, $wpdb->terms.name, $wpdb->terms.slug - FROM $wpdb->term_relationships - LEFT JOIN $wpdb->terms - ON $wpdb->term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = $wpdb->terms.term_id - LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_taxonomy - ON $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id = $wpdb->terms.term_id - WHERE $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id IN (".implode(',', $post_ids).") - AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category' + FROM $wpdb->term_relationships, $wpdb->term_taxonomy, $wpdb->terms + WHERE $wpdb->term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id + AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id = $wpdb->terms.term_id + AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category' + AND $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id IN (".implode(',', $post_ids).") ORDER BY $wpdb->terms.slug, $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id DESC ");
On issue #2, I’m thinking about modifying this plugin to accept another custom field called “article_category” to accept a string value of your category slug. Let’s say you feature a post that has 5 categories and set “article_category” custom field to “blogging” then the post will only show up once under the “blogging” category on your featured articles page. What do you guys think of this mod? If there is some demand for this, I will definitely move this to the top of my stack of projects and crank this out in a few hours. Please let me know via comments.
Q: What is SezWho?
A: ‘SezWho enables contributors to build portable reputation. Without SezWho user reputations are confined to a single site. With SezWho participants carry their reputation with them across the web.’
If you haven’t noticed, I’ve taken the initiative to integrate SezWho 2.0 into this blog. The screenshot above is what you will see if you hover over the “Check me out!” link next to every comment and post author on this blog. In this post I will tell you why I decided to integrate SezWho into this blog.
Read on…