OMNINOGGIN

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:

1. New features in WordPress 2.6
   
2. 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.

Read on…

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:

1. It doesn’t work with WordPress 2.3.x or 2.5.x
2. 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.

Previously I wrote “Make Your WordPress 10X faster During Traffic Storms“, which is a post about automatically turning WP-[Super]-Cache on/off and automatically switching your WordPress theme to a lighter theme during heavy traffic. One of the main reasons that I had this setup was because I could not get statistics to work with WP-Super-Cache (i.e. my chCounter & Popularity Contest plugin is hosed).

After some tinkering, I was able to get chCounter and Popularity Contest to work with WP-Super-Cache. This involves using javascript to count instead of PHP. chCounter was a simple change, but Popularity Contest was a bit more challenging. Usually I would immediately post the “How-to” here, or rather release the modded plugin to the public myself, but I believe that I shouldn’t step on Alex King’s shoes (the original developer of Popularity Contest). I’ve sent the Popularity Contest code to Alex for code review. He’s been doing some of the same work, and hopefully he can incorporate some of my changes into the plugin and release it to the public soon.

If anybody would like to use my version of the Popularity Contest before Alex King releases it to the public, you may download the WordPress 2.3.3 and WordPress 2.5 compatible version here:
Read on…