Category Archives: Plugin Releases

Release notes about my WordPress plugin releases

Easy Retweet Plugin v3.0.3 release

Published Jan 29, 2015 | In Plugin Releases

I just released v3.0.3 of my Easy Retweet WordPress plugin.

About Easy Retweet WordPress plugin

Easy Retweet WordPress Plugin that allows you to easily add Twitter tweet or bit.ly buttons to your WordPress posts.

You can choose to add these buttons using any one of the following ways

  • Automatic way – Just configure the button in the settings screen
  • Using shortcodes
  • Using template functions

You can also enable Google Analytics tracking for the links that are generated by buttons created by this plugin.

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Year End Stats Plugin v1.0 release

Published Dec 30, 2014 | In Plugin Releases

I just released v1.0 of my Year End Stats WordPress plugin just in time for you to write your year-end review posts.

This release adds a lot of new features and is a mandatory update.

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WP Github Gist plugin now supports the new Gist API

Published Jul 14, 2014 | In Plugin Releases

Like my Twitter Avatar plugin, even my WP Github Gist plugin was broken recently due to changes in the underlying API that my plugin was using. This time it was because of the changes in the Gist Embed API.

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Twitter Avatar plugin now supports the new Twitter API

Published Jul 13, 2014 | In Plugin Releases

Because of the recent changes in Twitter API, my Twitter Avatar Reloaded WordPress plugin stopped working. I rewrote the way my plugin communicates with Twitter and updated the code to use the new API and now my plugin works again.

New Twitter Backend

Instead of rewriting the entire Twitter backend again, I am not using the excellent wp-twitter-api, provided by @timwhitlock which allows you to easily communicate with Twitter API from your WordPress plugin.

If you are a WordPress plugin developer and want to communicate to the Twitter API from your WordPress plugin, then I would highly recommend you to use wp-twitter-api, instead of creating your own.

Setting up Twitter App

The new version of the Twitter API needs you to make authenticated calls even to get some basic information about a twitter screen name. So after you installed the plugin you need to follow these steps so that the plugin could interact with the Twitter API.

  • Register a Twitter application at https://dev.twitter.com/apps
  • Note the Consumer key and Consumer secret under OAuth settings
  • Log into WordPress admin and go to Settings > Twitter API
  • Enter the consumer key and secret and click ‘Save settings’
  • Click the ‘Connect to Twitter’ button and follow the prompts.

Download

This is a mandatory update. You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s homepage or install it using the Plugin installer.

Feedback

Please keep the feedback coming and if you want me to add any new features or find a bug, please leave a comment or post about it in twitter.

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Email Log plugin is now fully WordPress Multisite compatible

Published Apr 1, 2014 | In Plugin Releases

I just released version 1.7 of my Email Log WordPress plugin, which adds full compatibility with WordPress Multisite.

About Email Log WordPress plugin

Email Log is a WordPress plugin that allows you to log every email sent through WordPress and provides a UI where you can view them. The logged emails can be searched based on date, email address or subject.

WordPress Multisite compatibility

Earlier versions of Email Log plugin had some compatibility with WordPress Mu (older version of multisite), but I didn’t test it for long time. Also when WordPress Mu got merged into WordPress core, certain things have changed and my plugin was not fully compatible after that.

I came to know about it recently and then started to work on it to make it fully compatible with WordPress Multisite, since I have moved this blog to WordPress Multisite as well. I also learned a lot about WordPress Multisite during the process and will write a separate blog article about it soon. Update: As promised, here is the new blog article explaining how to properly create tables in WordPress Multisite plugins.

Dev Time

This release took me about 2.5 hours of development time. You can find more details about the dev time tracking which I have recently started doing in a separate blog post.

Download

You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page.

Feedback

Try out the Plugin and if you have any comments or if you want to report any bugs, please leave a comment below.

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Easy Retweet plugin now supports Google Analytics tracking

Published Jun 11, 2013 | In Plugin Releases

I recently released a couple of updates to my Easy Retweet WordPress Plugin.

For those who don’t know, Easy Retweet WordPress Plugin allows you to add Twitter tweet or bit.ly buttons to your WordPress posts.

You can choose to add these buttons using any one of the following ways

  • Automatic way – Just configure the button in the settings screen
  • Using shortcodes
  • Using template functions

Google Analytics tracking

One of the new feature that I have added to the Plugin is the ability to add Google Analytics tracking to links that are tweeted using the Tweet buttons.

You can add Google Analytics tracking by including the following in the url that gets tweeted.

  • utm-campaign
  • utm-source
  • utm-medium

Translations

In addition to the new features, I have also added translations for the following languages

  • Danish
  • Irish
  • Hindi
  • Romanian

Mandatory update

The current version of the Plugin is 3.0.1 and it includes both new features and bug fixes. So it is a mandatory update. You can install it from your WordPress admin or download it from the Plugin homepage.

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Completely rewrote WP-IRC Plugin

Published Jan 26, 2013 | In Plugin Releases

It’s been quite sometime since I released my WP-IRC WordPress Plugin. A couple of users complained about the increase in page load time and so I decided to fix it and ultimately ended up rewriting it.

By the way if you have not used it before, WP-IRC is a WordPress Plugin, that retrieves the number of users who are currently online in an irc channels and allows you to display this information in the sidebar using widgets.

Dynamic update using AJAX to decrease page load time

Since the Plugin has to connect to the irc server through sockets and do some protocol exchange to retrieve the user count in a channel, it was increasing the page load time drastically and was the major complaint that I was receiving about the Plugin.

I tired to decrease the page load time by lazily connecting to the irc server after the page is loaded using AJAX to retrieve the user count. This has drastically decreased the page load time and was one of the highlight of this rewrite.

You can check out this excellent article to find out how to use AJAX in WordPress.

Added caching to decrease page load time

In addition to using AJAX, I have also implemented caching so that the Plugin doesn’t have to connect to the irc server for every page load to retrieve the user count.

I implemented caching using transients in WordPress.

Support for multiple widgets

One of the other highlights of this release is that, I have enabled support for multiple instance of the widgets. This will allow users to use multiple widgets, each with its own configuration.

I implemented it using the Widgets API of WordPress.

Translation support

Finally I have also added support for internationalization in my Plugin. The .pot file is under the /languages folder and if you are willing to do translation for the Plugin, use the pot file to create the .po files for your language and let me know.

Download and source code

You can download the Plugin from its homepage and the source code is available at github.

Try out the Plugin and do let me know if you have any feedback or comments.

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WordPress Plugin to add Foss.in badge

Published Nov 10, 2012 | In Plugin Releases

I just wrote a WordPress Plugin, that allows you to display the Foss.in badge on your WordPress based website.

If you just want a easy setup, then you can just use the sidebar widget that is available when you install the Plugin. If you want more control over the display, then you can the template function yourself. Details about the template function is available in the Plugin’s homepage.

BTW, did I tell you that I am going to be speaking at foss.in? 🙂 Yes, my proposal got selected and I will be talking about building robots using Open hardware like Arduino.

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Posts By Tag Plugin now supports excluding current post

Published Apr 15, 2012 | In Plugin Releases

I recently released a couple of updates to my Posts By Tag WordPress Plugin, which allows you to display a list of posts based on tags either in the sidebar as a widget or inside your posts using either shortcodes or a template tag.

Changes

The following are the changes that I have made to the Plugin

  • Ability to exclude current post/page
  • Moved caching logic to widget
  • Added Lithuanian translations

Ability to exclude current post/page

One of the most requested feature in the Plugins was to have the ability to exclude the current post in the listing. This could happen when ever you are including the tag of the current post also in the list of tags.

Now I have added an option in the widget to exclude the current post or page.

This option is also available even if you are using either the template tag or the shortcode

Moved caching logic to widget

I have cleaned up the logic which I was using to cache the DB queries used by the Plugin. If you are using the widget, then the output of the widget itself is cached. If for some reason, you don’t want to the widget to cache the queries you can disable it as well.

But if you are using the shortcode or the template tag, then you have to manually cache the output or the db queries.

Dev Time

This release took me about 3.5 hours of development time. You can find more details about the dev time tracking which I have recently started doing in a separate blog post.

Download

You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page.

Feedback

Try out the Plugin and if you have any comments or if you want to report any bugs, please leave a comment below.

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter . If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter .

 

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Bulk Delete Plugin now supports deleting by permalink

Published Apr 10, 2012 | In Plugin Releases

I have recently released lot of updates to my Bulk Delete (which is a WordPress Plugin that allows you delete posts in bulk). The new updates allows the user to delete posts based on permalink in addition to deleting by tags or categories.

Like the previous updates, this feature was also requested by the users of the Plugin. So if you have any feedback or feature request, don’t hesitate to contact me, I will try to add them to the Plugin.

New features

The following are the new features that are supported by the Plugin

  • Ability to delete posts by permalink. This features was written by Martin Capodici
  • Major UI revamp. Let me know if you have any feedback about the new UI.
  • Added debug information, which should help you to debug issues related to your server.
  • Added roles and capabilities for menu.

Bug Fixes

The following are some of the bug fixes which have gone into the releases

  • Fixed issues with translations
  • Fixed a major issue in the way how dates were handled
  • Fixed CSS issues in IE

Translations

The following are the different languages for which translations have been added. If you are willing to translate the Plugin in your language, then you can find the pot file inside the language’s folder.

  • Turkish
  • Spanish
  • Italian
  • Bulgarian
  • Russian
  • Lithuanian

Dev Time

All these releases combinedly took me about 11 hours of development time. From this release on I have started tracking the amount of time I am spending on each release of my WordPress Plugins. There is a separate blog post, which explains the reasons why I track my development time.

Download

You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page.

Feedback

Try out the Plugin and if you have any comments or if you want to report any bugs, please leave a comment below.

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter . If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter .

 

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