Category Archives: Plugin Releases

Release notes about my WordPress plugin releases

Post to FriendFeed 1.0

I have updated my Post to FriendFeed WordPress Plugin to v1.0

New Features

The following are the new features that I have added to the Plugin

Pluggable Filters

I have added the following filters to the Plugin which can be hooked by your own code.

  • post2ff_blog_url – The link which will be posted to Friendfeed
  • post2ff_blog_excerpt – The excerpt that will be posted as the first comment to Friendfeed
  • post2ff_blog_images – The images that will be posted to Friendfeed

The following code example explains how you can use bit.ly (or any url shortening service) to shorten the link that will be posted to Friendfeed.

add_filter(‘post2ff_blog_url’,’your_plugin_short_url’);

function your_plugin_short_url($url) {
	$shorten_url = get_short_url($url);
	return $shorten_url;
}

You can place the above code either in your own Plugin or in the functions.php file of your theme. If you want to shorten the url using bit.ly then you can use the code from my other post.

You can use the similar technique to change the excerpt or images, which will be posted to Friendfeed.

Translation

I have added the ability to translate the Plugin. The pot file is available with the Plugin. 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. I will add it to the Plugin after giving credit to you.

Update

You can download the latest version of the Plugin form its home page. It is an optional update and doesn’t change anything in the front-end.

Feedback

As usual, if you have any feedback, queries or questions, feel free and leave a comment.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Disable/Enable retweet button for each post

Okay, yet another update to my Easy Retweet Plugin. 🙂

Configure retweet button for each post

Now you can enable or disable the retweet button for each post or page. When you update to the new version, you will see a new box on the right hand side of the write post/page screen where you can enable or disable the button.

This setting will over ride all the other options which are set in the admin console page.

Screenshot

Easy Retweet WordPress Plugin Screenshot

Removed the hard coded wp-content path

I have also removed the hard coded reference to the wp-content path. This means that the Plugin will work for people who have moved their wp-content to a different folder.

This change involved a hack to make the JavaScript work properly. I will write an article explaining this hack in detail, meanwhile if you can’t wait then check out the source code. It is well documented. 🙂

Download

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

Feedback

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

Vote for the Plugin

If you have used this Plugin and like it, please vote it and help me win the WordPress Plugin competition.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Posts By Tag 0.3

Just a quick note, to let you all know that I have updated my Posts By Tag WordPress Plugin to version 0.3

Features

The following are the changes in the new version

Improvements to caching

Now the Plugin caches the entire HTML generated by the widget, not just the query which is used to retrieve posts. This should improve the performance of the Plugin and will reduce some mill-seconds of your page load time, if you have enabled caching.

Turkish Translation

The credit for this goes to Yakup Gövler. I have checked in the Turkish .po and .mo files, in this release.

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. I will add it to the Plugin after giving credit to you.

Update

You can download the latest version of the Plugin form its home page. It is an optional update and doesn’t change anything in the front-end.

Feedback

As usual, if you have any feedback, queries or questions, feel free and leave a comment.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Easy Retweet now supports creating shorturls using your own bit.ly API key

I have added some new features and fixed a couple of bugs to my Easy Retweet Plugin after the recent update.

Specifying your own bit.ly API Key

Now you can specify your own bit.ly API key to create shorturls and associate them to your own bit.ly account, instead of using the build-in default account.

The main use of this feature is that, now you can track the clicks and stats for these shorturls from your bit.ly account dashboard. But be warned that, once option is enabled, the Plugin will create shorturl for all posts in your blog. Your bit.ly account might become a mess, if you have large number of posts in your blog.

Screenshot

The following is the screenshot of the admin UI with the new features

easy-retweet-new-settings

Download

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

Feedback

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

Vote for the Plugin

If you have used this Plugin and like it, please vote it and help me win the WordPress Plugin competition.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Helper Plugin for Tweetbacks

Tweetbacks is a great Plugin created by Yoast, which can be used to retrieve tweets about your blog posts from Twitter and import them as comments in your WordPress blog.

This Plugin automatically populates the short urls of your blog posts permalink from a couple of url shortening services like tinyurl, isgd, snipr etc. But since I am planning to use my own url shortening service I wanted an interface, where I can add my own short urls.

More over, Tweetbacks uses the built-in Pseudo cron of WordPress to schedule tweet retrievals. I wanted to get away with this since it might increase the page load time. Instead I wanted to use the built-in crontab in my server, hosted at Linode.

Tweetbacks Helper Plugin

So the result is my new Tweetbacks Helper WordPress Plugin. 🙂

Tweetbacks Helper Plugin can be used to disable/enable Tweetbacks scheduler or the cron scheduler. It also provides a url which can be pinged from my crontab.

 

In the write post page, this Plugin adds a small box on the right hand side with the list of short urls which Tweetbacks has found. There is a also a provision by which other short urls can be added.

 

Download

You can download the Plugin from the Plugins homepage.

Translation

The pot file is available with the Plugin. 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. I will add it to the Plugin after giving credit to you.

Feedback

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

Vote for the Plugin

If you have used this Plugin and like it, please vote it at the Plugin Competition Blog to help me win the WordPress Plugin competition.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Display number of people online in an IRC channel in WordPress sidebar

Time for one more WordPress Plugin from me. 😉

I wrote this Plugin some time ago to be used in proto.in but was never got time to release it to the outside world. The code was sitting in my disk for sometime, and the WordPress Plugin competition motivated me to dust of the code, update and release it.

Well WP-IRC Plugin (for lack of a better name 😉 ) can fetch the number of users online in any IRC channel and can be scheduled to auto refresh it every x minutes.

The count thus fetched can be displayed in the sidebar of your blog using a sidebar widget provided by the Plugin.

You can also allow users to subscribe to email alerts like, “alert me after x number of people has come online”.

Screenshot

Download

You can download the Plugin as a zip file from the Plugin’s Homepage.

Feedback

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

Vote for the Plugin

If you have used this Plugin and like it, please vote it at the Plugin Competition Blog to help me win the WordPress Plugin competition.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

One more way of adding retweet buttons to posts in WordPress

I have added some more new features to the Easy Retweet Plugin after the recent update.

Support for shortcode

Easy Retweet Plugin now supports shortcodes. Now you can place the retweet button anywhere (and even within) in the post. All you have to do is just to include the following shortcode, where you want the button to be displayed.

[ easy-retweet ]

The above shortcode will be replaced with the retweet button when the post is rendered. Cool hah? 🙂

Adding prefix to the Twitter message

The other new feature is that, now you can specify any text as prefix for the Twitter message. You can add your own twitter username or any other message that you wanted to be prefixed.

The following is the screenshot of the admin UI with this feature.

easy-retweet-new-settings-ui

Apart from this I have also made some performance improvements to the Plugin, which will work behind the scenes.

Download

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

Feedback

Please keep the feedback coming and if you want me to add any new features or find a bug, please leave a comment. By the way Easy Retweet Plugin was featured in this week’s episode of WordCast. Thank you guys.

Vote for the Plugin

If you have used this Plugin and like it, please vote it at the Plugin Competition Blog to help me win the WordPress Plugin competition.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Display posts from a set of tags in the sidebar

Recently I was looking for ways to display posts from a specific set of tags in the sidebar.

I preferred a sidebar widget rather than making changes directly to the theme files, because if I am using a widget I don’t need to remember to make the change again when choosing a different theme.

A quick search didn’t yield any results which made me to write my own Plugin and thus the Posts By Tag WordPress Plugin was born.

Features

Posts By Tag Plugin provides a sidebar widget (using the new Widget API provided in WordPress 2.8) which can be configured to display posts from a set of tags in the sidebar. You can have multiple widgets with different set of tags configured for each one of them.

Each widget allows you to choose

  • The set of tags whose posts should be displayed
  • The number of posts to be displayed.
  • Option to enable post excerpts to be displayed with post titles.
  • Option to display post thumbnail if present.

Caching

The Plugins caches the posts of each widget separately, and issues database queries only when needed. This will reduce the amount of database queries involved for each page load and will therefore be light on your server.

Screenshot

Tag Posts Widget Settings

Download

You can download the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page. After downloading the zip file, extract it and upload the contents to the wp-content directory. Activate the Plugin from the Plugins page and you should see a new widget called “Tag Posts” in the widgets pages.

Feedback

As usual try out the Plugin and do let me know if you have any feedback, queries or comments.

PS: I am using the built-in tags auto-complete script used in the Write Post page. I will write a separate post explaining how to integrate tags auto-complete script in your Plugins.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Couple of more options to configure Easy Retweet Plugin

I am getting lot of positive feedback for my Easy Retweet WordPress Plugin and I am really very happy about it. It is really a great feeling to know that the code you wrote is liked by other people.

New Features

Getting back to the Plugin, I have added two more options to it so that you can have fine grain control over how the button it is displayed in your posts. They are

  • You can now customize the text that is displayed in button. This will be particularly useful if you are running a non English WordPress blog.
  • You can now choose whether you want the button to appear in the home page or not.

Screenshot

The following is the screenshot of the admin UI with the new features.

easy-retweet-new-features

Download

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

Feedback

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

PS: BTW today my blog has got the highest number of visits per day in its entire history of existence for the past 5 years and more than 50% of the traffic was to the Easy Retweet Plugin. 🙂

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Bulk Delete now supports deleting pending and scheduled posts

I have added two more new features to my Bulk Delete WordPress Plugin.

  • Ability to bulk delete pending posts
  • Ability to bulk delete scheduled (future) posts

Screenshot

This is the screenshot of the admin UI with the new features.

bulk-delete-settings

Download

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

What’s Next

The next feature which I am going to add to the Plugin is the ability to translate the Plugin in multiple languages. I am working on creating the .pot file so that others can translate the Plugin, by generating .po files.

Like the previous update, both these features were 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.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | 2 Comments