kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Tag Archives: wordpress

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.

WordPress Plugin Search Finally Works!

WordPress LogoI did not get a chance to blog this when it first came out, but I’ve just used it again and I cannot possibly let it pass without note. WordPress has drastically improved the plugin search. They announced the upgrade a few weeks ago on the WordPress development blog.

I’ve been hard on the poor WordPress guys in the past, so I feel a special obligation to acknowledge the improvement. The search now does a great job of indexing titles, descriptions and keywords to help plugins show up quickly and easily.

Best of all for me, a search for “random image” puts the Random Image selector plugin at the top of the list (at the time of this writing at least).

Thanks WordPress guys!!

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.

WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” Released

I really don’t have any time to do a nice full-length post on the release of WordPress 2.7 tonight. So I’ll provide a whole bunch of links for you to get your 2.7 fix.

If you’ve not tried 2.7 yet, read over the new info then give it a shot.  The super-new-and-improved admin interface is well worth the upgrade!

WordCamp Whistler 2009 Details Released

WordCamp Whistler is a go for 2009!

January 24th and 25th in Whistler a meeting of WordPress minds will meet up in Whistler, BC. The keynote speaker for the event will be Blogging Evangelist Lorelle VanFossen.

If you’re in the Vancouver-Whistler area, or can plan to be here the $35 entry fee is a great price for such a high-quality event. If you’re already registered, grab a badge and pimp the event on your site, your twitter or anywhere else!

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 2.7 Beta 1 Released

Old News? Yea, kinda.  I forgot to actually hit the publish button on this post a few days back…

For those of you who’ve been following the development of the next iteration of WordPress you already know that 2.7 Beta 1 was released last Friday night.

WP 2.7 features some really great refinements to the admin panel which not only make it more useful, they also serve as the building blocks for the next few generations of WordPress.

I’ve been messing around with 2.7 for the last month or so on my WP sandbox and it’s been very interesting to watch the evolution of the menuing system.

I’ll be drawing up a full review for the AGP blog which I’ll post once the full release happens.

WordPress Weekly – Usability with Jane Wells

This past Friday I joined Jeffro for another episode of WordPress Weekly.  This week we had the good fortune to interview Automattic’s usability maven Jane Wells.

Jane is one of the minds behind some of the dramatic new changes to the admin interface for WordPress 2.7.  Recently Jane also posted a poll and a survey to garner some feedback on the new WordPress Beta that was released on Halowe’en night.

Give this week’s show a listen and check out some of the great answers to the questions that we came up with.

AGP Episode 007 Released

Geeks.  Aussie Geeks.

The long awaited seventh installment of the Aussie Geek Podcast is released.  This should be the last time I edit and post-produce a show for a while.  I have enjoyed it, and learned a whole lot about podcast post-production, and even about this show that I’ve been a part of for the last 18 months.

This week on the show we covered some economics including Yahoo! layoffs, iPhone sales and the effects of the tech slowdown on startups in Europe.

We also touched on an app to moderate WordPress comments from your desktop and a graphics package to create stunning high dynamic range (HDR) images which works on all platforms.

At the end of the show we’ve got the first in a series of musical appearances by the Lizards from Afar, and the show closes out with a blooper segment that’s sure to make Dave retalliate in episode 8.

Go have a listen to the Aussie Geek Podcast #007 :: Armchair Economists.  Better yet subscribe to the show in iTunes or directly via the show feed.