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…

In response to JTPratt’s comment on my post, “Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache,” I am releasing a modification of Lester Chan’s WP-PostViews plugin to support counting using Javascript. Please try it out to see if this works for you.

A side note to Lester Chan and Richer Yang (WP-PostViews and WP-PostViews Plus authors repectively). Please feel free to contact me about incorporating these changes into WP-PostViews and/or WP-PostViews Plus so that it can be officially committed to the wp-plugins.org repository. I would create my own version of WP-PostViews in the repository, but do not want to steal your thunder :).

Read on…

Over the past few months, I’ve been meaning to create a staging WordPress blog that is an exact replica of my production OMNINOGGIN blog so I can test major feature changes before releasing them to my production site.  I have to admit that there are many other interesting things to spend time on (see also: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache and NowThen Photo Display WordPress Plugin) so I have been lagging at getting this task done.  Fortunately the WordPress 2.5 released was enough to motivate me to get this done.  My goal in this post is to provide a step-by-step set of instructions (or checklist) for getting this task done.  I run Apache 2.2.8, MySQL 5.0.51a, and PHP 5.2.5 on a FreeBSD 7.0 machine that I have complete control over.  Keep in mind that these steps will vary depending on how your blog is configured.  It is a good checklist nonetheless so without further ado:

Read on…

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…