kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Tag Archives: Wordpress Plugins

Admin Links Plugin Updated to 1.4.0

It’s been a good long while since I’ve had the time to make any changes to the two WordPress plugins I’m supporting. In fact if WP 3.0 hadn’t broken one of my plugins there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have made this change either.

That said, there’s a fresh version of the Admin Links plugin available and this one is compatible with WP 3.0.

In case you’re not familiar with the plugin, it provides access to common admin features from the public side of the site. Visible to logged-in admins, and completely invisible to the great unwashed masses of the interwebs.

Download it directly from WordPress.org.

Thoughts on a New Podcast

Podcasting :: Deliver personally driven messages to anyone who's interested. Develop your own "pod culture."

Over the past year or so I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting up a podcast of my own to go along with the efforts that I’ve put in with Dave and Cait on the Aussie Geek Podcast. I love doing the AGP and it helps to stimulate a large portion of the geek side of my personality… but not all of it. The one piece that it leaves off is the developer piece.

I’ve tried to stimulate this in a few different ways in the past, writing blog posts around pieces of code; trying to kick off a standalone open-source project and writing my two plugins for WordPress (Admin Links Widget, Random Image Selector). Though these were all items that I enjoyed they lacked a certain interactivity.

When Jeff offered to let me co-host WordPress Weekly to provide a developer’s perspective it gave me the unique opportunity of mixing my interest in software development with an interaction with a community. I only did a handful of shows at the end of last year, but it helped to reinforce that I really enjoyed putting my skills to use providing information for other people.

There are a great number of development-focused podcasts which discuss wider abstract concepts, and complex topics but precious few which dive into the nuts and bolts of specific software development topics.  Examples of a couple that I’ve really enjoyed listening to lately are the .NET Rocks! podcast (Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell) and the Stack Overflow podcast (Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky).

Realistically, this new show idea won’t come to pass until later this year, probably in the April-May timeframe as I have several weeks of school to get through before I explain to my lovely wife why I’m spending yet more time in front of the computer.

So there it is, out in the open: I hope to be releasing a development-focused show sometime later this year.

Multiple RSS Feeds with DualFeeds

rssI’m a huge fan of bloggers (and podcasters and well… everyone else for that matter) using full feeds for subscribers to their sites.  I’ve got no time for people who demand that I hit their website to be able to read the content.  If you want to monetize the feed that’s fine, but let me read it where I want.

That said, I was contemplating this evening whether it would be possible to offer both full and summary feeds from kdmurray.net.  The reason? I wanted to start pushing partial posts to Facebook with a minimum of fuss.

The problem? WordPress only supports one post feed out of the box.

The solution?  Stephen Cronin‘s DualFeeds plugin (which I found thanks to @bluefur on Twitter).  The plugin allows you to create multiple feeds one for full-posts, and a second for post summaries.  This is a very elegant solution to the problem.  Though I wanted to add the stuff into Facebook, I didn’t want to push whole posts because I did want to try and use this to drive some traffic to the site.

Technically the plugin works very well.  I was able to set it up in just a couple of minutes and after about 15 minutes of testing have found that it plays nice with FeedBurner’s FeedSmith plugin, as well as my other feed-related plugin FeedEntryHeader — the latter as it turns out was also written by Stephen Cronin.

If you’ve ever wanted to be able to offer multiple feeds from your site, have a look at DualFeeds.  Works like a charm.

One Year Anniversary: Random Image Selector 1.2.0

I can’t believe it’s been one year since the last major release of the random image selector.  Since the plugin’s initial inception last summer it has received a fair amount of attention garnering nearly 11,000 downloads.

Random Image Selector - Downloads Per Day

Random Image Selector - Downloads Per Day

I’m glad that it’s proven useful for people and there will be a major update coming out over the Christmas break to coincide with the WordPress 2.7 release.  This update will include a few bug fixes, a couple of minor feature changes and one significant addition.

Thanks to everyone who has downloaded the plugin, and to those who have left feedback on the blog!

WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1

After what has seemed a rather lengthy wait, WordPress 2.7 has graduated from the Beta phase to RC1. The new release of WordPress has a completely redesigned admin section bringing back some features that went away in 2.5, and adding to the party a brand new dashboard which makes the platform that much more useful.

I’ve just run the 2.7 update myself tonight (I swore I’d wait until the full release before putting it on the main blog… but I couldn’t wait anymore) and I’m really liking the changes so far. The fact that I can quickly look at the dashboard and see comment stats, recent everything and pen a draft all at the same time is great.

So far everything looks good, though I did have to deactivate a couple of plugins to make things work as expected.  TinyMCE Advanced was causing some CSS issues (I could fix it I’m sure but… meh).  In addition I had a plugin to replace the category box in the sidebar when posting which isn’t required anymore with 2.7.

Stay tuned here for more of the pros, cons and otherwise of the newest member of the WordPress family.

WordPress 2.6 – Restore the “Add Image” button

During the recent upgrade to WP 2.6 I noticed that the old “Add Image” button was missing.  This is something I use quite a bit because it’s quick and simple.  Call me old fashioned, but I don’t particularly care for the new Media-bar uploader.

After some searching on Google and the WordPress.org forums, I came across a relatively easy fix.  To restore this button, and add a few others, you can install the TinyMCE Advanced plugin.  TinyMCE is the editor that’s built in to WordPress’ visual editor.

Once the plugin is added, all the functionality you had before will be restored, along with a ton of cool new neato features!

WordPress 2.5: The rubber hits the road

WordPress LogoWordPress 2.5 is out, warts and all, for public consumption today.  Many users are opting to wait for a burn-in period to take place before taking the plunge.  Several major updates from WordPress have had a point-release take place within days, usually to fix a security flaw.

I have installed it on the sandbox where I’m playing around with the Options theme and won’t be applying the upgrade here until I’m ready to move everything over, including the theme.

The biggest complaint from most is the redesign of the admin pages.  People don’t like change.  There is added functionality and a brand new layout to the admin screens.  After having played with it for only a couple of days, I find myself fumbling around a bit still… but overall the new look isn’t too bad.

Many of the links I used most often are now displayed in the main admin toolbar (blue links) while the less often used links are in the grey bar at the top of the page.  These are the high-level nav buttons like the dashboard.  I think this design will indeed prove effective for people who spend quite a bit of time in the admin console, but will be more difficult for casual users to adopt.

I’ll be posting updates to both the Random Image Selector plugin and the Admin Links Widget in the near future to ensure compliance with the WP 2.5 code.

WordPress Woes: Read the Damned Instructions!

Recently some of you may have noticed some instability with the theme on this blog. The theme on the blog seemed to reset to the WordPress default without any rhyme or reason. I assumed it was one of the many plugins I had installed to try to provide additional content or functionality on the site. I tried enabling and disabling all of the plugins but to no avail, there didn’t seem to be anything that would correct the problem outright.

After several hours of frustration, I came across an article on coderemedy.com which provided an explanation, and pointed me at Scott Burkett’s blog for a solution.

What it boils down to is this: I use Alex King’s WP-Mobile plugin to permit the blog to be viewed on small mobile devices (like my own Treo 700wx) and this plugin was not set up correctly. I made the assumption that the plugin behaved like any other and didn’t read the readme file. Suffice to say there’s an extra step with this plugin and I didn’t follow it.

Once the plugin is uncompressed there is a second wp-mobile directory which needs to be moved into your wp-content/themes directory. The directory structure looks something like this:

wordpress/

    wp-content/

        themes/

        plugins/

            wp-mobile/

                README.txt     (where the solution is!)

                wp-mobile.php

                wp-mobile/

                    comments.php

                    index.php

                    style.css

Once the move is complete, the directory structure looks like this:

wordpress/

    wp-content/

        themes/

            wp-mobile/

                comments.php

                index.php

                style.css

        plugins/

            wp-mobile/

                README.txt     (where the solution is!)

                wp-mobile.php

See? Simple! Just read the damned instructions.

Admin Links Widget for WordPress 1.1.0 Released

Well after a far more successful 2007 than I could have imagined, I’ve released the first significant feature update to the Admin Links Widget.

First, THANK YOU to everyone who has downloaded the widget.  It has been downloaded an astonishing 2300 times since the inaugural release on August 14th of last year.

The most significant changes for this version are the addition of two new links that you can add to your site:

  1. Edit This Post
  2. Edit This Page

These links provide you the opportunity to edit a specific page or post from a link in the sidebar whenever you’re viewing a single page or post (ie not the front-page, or a search result).  This is particularly useful for blogs which don’t have an edit link built into their current theme.

Please take a moment and download the latest version of the plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.  And as always, if you have any feedback, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment on the blog.

Scope Creep – A Real World Example

Here’s a real-life example of how scope creep can absolutely kill a project you’re working on. I tend to find that this particular phenomenon tends to take hold of my projects on a regular basis, and I’ve been actively trying to combat it for quite a while now.

The project in question was a very simple installation of TwitterFeed on my blog. In my recent rediscovery of Twitter, I’ve noticed lots of folks seem to be auto-creating tweets when new posts go up… and quite frankly, I wanted in on that action. ;)

First, a description of the problem. The scope creep I talk about tends to come up when a simple project begins to show you options that you just have to could implement. Each option can really be a project in and of itself, and as a result the original project (which should have taken 10 minutes) has taken you the whole night and you’re up until one in the morning working on it and then blogging about the problem! :mrgreen:

Here are the basic instructions for setting up TwitterFeed:

  1. Step One: Decide you want TwitterFeed
  2. Step Two: Provide OpenID credentials
  3. Step Three: Start using TwitterFeed
  4. DONE!

Here is the example of what happens when you let your curiosity about the extendability of the same plugin get the better of you. Instead of getting this all to work as expected, it causes an evening of frustration.

  1. Step One: Decide you want TwitterFeed
  2. Step Two: Discover that TwitterFeed uses OpenID
  3. Step Three: Read the OpenID tutorial and discover that you can host your own OpenID server
  4. Step Four: Download the OpenID code
  5. Step Five: Read the roll-your-own-OpenID tutorial and discover that you should use OpenSSL
  6. Step Six: Do trial and error until you find a way to actually get the OpenSSL working
  7. Step Seven: After 2 hours of searching, submit a support ticket and give up on the SSL for now
  8. Step Eight: Go get something to drink. Something strong
  9. Step Nine: Configure phpmyid
  10. Step Ten: Add code to your site.
  11. Step Eleven: Realize that it doesn’t work and use a regular OpenID account until you get more time…
  12. DONE!

I rest my case. So let this be a lesson to you:

  1. Figure out what you need to get done
  2. Get it done
  3. Make notes of the other options along the way
  4. DONE!