Tag Archives: WordPress

Exciting new features for developers in WordPress 2.8

Published Jun 8, 2009 | In WordPress

Update: WordPress 2.8 is out now. Update at your earliest and enjoy 🙂

WordPress 2.8 is tentatively scheduled to be released on June 10. Even though there are no major new features, there are certain features that will be exciting for WordPress developers like me 🙂grey-l

I am listing out some of them below.

Custom Taxonomies

WordPress 2.8 is going to support custom taxonomies in addition to the three built-in taxonomies category, tag and link_category. I am very excited about this, because when a new taxonomy is added, WordPress 2.8 will automatically add meta boxes in the Write Post page and will also add new Admin menus to handle them. Justin Tadlock has written article where he describes custom Taxonomies in detail.

New Widget API

There is going to be a new and improved API for writing widgets in WordPress 2.8. Right now creating widgets, especially multi-instance widgets is complex.

In WordPress 2.8, there is going to be a new class called WP_Widget which will abstract most of the complexity involved in creating widgets. This new class supports both single and multi-instance widgets. Justin Tadlock has also written an excellent guide which explains how widgets can be created using the new widget API.

Enhanced code Editor

The Plugin and theme editors have been enhanced tremendously. They now have support for syntax highlighting and function lookup. Personally, this is a great news for me because I edit most my Plugins using this editor and syntax highlighting will surely help me to do it quickly.

wordpress-plugin-editor

Promotion to migrate to PHP 5

Even though WordPress 2.8 will continue to support PHP 4, the automatic upgrader will suggest those running PHP 4 to switch to PHP 5. It will also link to a Codex page describing how to switch for various hosts should be provided. At last there are symptoms of light at the end of the tunnel 😉

Authentication more pluggable

Even though the support for oAuth has been moved to 2.9, the initial steps towards the integration have been done and now the authentication code of WordPress is more pluggable.

SimplePie in core

SimplePie, the well know PHP library for RSS parsing is going to be included in the core. This is going to be great news because, this will make available the power of RSS parsing to all Plugins without installing the SimplePie core Plugin.

Loading JavaScript in footer

The high performance website rule states that we have to push JavaScript to the footer for better performance. WordPress 2.8 now makes it possible for Plugins to specify whether a script should be included in the header or in the footer. Isn’t that exciting? 😉

Other minor exciting features

In addition to the above major features, WordPress 2.8 also has the following features which may be of interest to developers.

  • Filters for AIM, Yahoo, and Jabber IM labels, in user profile, so that, they can be changed via Plugins.
  • New hook “after_db_upgrade”, which you can use to add upgrade functions for your Plugin.
  • Added support for blocking all outbound HTTP requests via Plugins.
  • Ability for a Plugin to control how many posts are displayed on edit pages.
  • Support for proxy. Helpful, if your installation is in an intranet.
  • Menus can be reordered via Plugin

Update libraries bundled with WordPress

The following are the libraries (with their version numbers) that are updated in WordPress 2.8

  • TinyMCE – 3.2.4.1
  • jQuery – 1.3.2
  • Jcrop – 0.9.8
  • pclzip – 2.8
  • PHPMailer – 2.0.4
  • SWFUpload – 2.2.0.1

I am pretty excited about WordPress 2.8 and eagerly waiting for it. If you want to get your hands dirty with it right now, you can try out WordPress 2.8 Release candidate 1.

Update: WordPress 2.8 is out now. Update at your earliest and enjoy 🙂

Posted in WordPress | Tagged | 2 Comments

Making Yahoo Pipes feed work in wp-o-matic

Published Jun 7, 2009 | In WordPress

Recently I was playing with wp-o-matic WordPress Plugin using a feed from Yahoo pipes. For the uninitiated, wp-o-matic is a WordPress Plugin which enables you to create new posts automatically from RSS or Atom feeds and Yahoo pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator.

After configuring everything, wp-o-matic kept on saying “0 posts fetched”, even though there were some posts in the feed generated by Yahoo pipes. After some research, I found out that I was not the only one facing this issue and there seems to be a bug in wp-o-matic which breaks feed urls having ampersand (&) character.

After digging into the code further, I found out the url is HTML encoded and stored in the database and is not decoded while retrieved. This occurs in the addCampaignFeed() function at line 1011 in the wpomatic.php file.

function addCampaignFeed($id, $feed)
{
    global $wpdb;
    $simplepie = $this->fetchFeed($feed, true);
    $url = $wpdb->escape($simplepie->subscribe_url());
    // code continues

In the above code, the function $simplepie->subscribe_url() returns the html encoded url. So to fix this, we have to pass the url to the htmlspecialchars_decode function. So to fix the bug we have to use the below code.

function addCampaignFeed($id, $feed)
{
    global $wpdb;
    $simplepie = $this->fetchFeed($feed, true);
    $url = $wpdb->escape(htmlspecialchars_decode($simplepie->subscribe_url()));
    // code continues

I have also notified the Plugin author about this and hopefully should be fixed soon, till then you can use the above code change if you are using feed from Yahoo pipes.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , | 21 Comments

WordPress and WordPress MU are going to be merged

Published May 31, 2009 | In WordPress

Yes, you have read the title correctly, the codebase of both WordPress (single user installation) and WordPress MU (multi-user installation) are going to be merged into a single codebase.

Matt, the founder and lead developer of WordPress has announced this news during his State of the Word speech at WordCamp San Francisco.

It is not clear when this merging will be done, but my guess is that they will be merged in WordPress 3.0. Once the integration is done, we can have BuddyPress for single user installs also.

This is great news both for the developers and end users and I am very excited about it. 🙂

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Added support for rooms in Post to FriendFeed

Published May 29, 2009 | In Plugin Releases

I have updated my Post to FriendFeed WordPress Plugin to add support for rooms. Now you can choose, in which room the post should be posted.

Screenshot

Here is the screenshot of the new feature.

post-to-friendfeed

Dependency

Please note that this Plugin now requires my FriendFeed API Core Plugin to be installed to work. You can download my FriendFeed API Core Plugin from my Plugins page.

Feedback

If you have any comments or if you want to report any bugs, please leave a comment below or contact me.

Credits

Thanks to the Rob, Ken and to all others who commented in this FriendFeed discussion. It’s only your comments which made me to dust off the code and update it. 🙂

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , , | 15 Comments

Using FriendFeed API in your WordPress Plugin

Published May 28, 2009 | In Plugin Releases

I am working on some new features for my Post to FriendFeed WordPress Plugin, and it required some additional methods to the FriendFeed API wrapper. I have added these methods to the FriendFeed API wrapper and have released it as a separate Plugin like Open Flash Chart Core Plugin.

Additional Methods

The following are the additional methods that I have added to the FriendFeed API wrapper library.

fetch_user_profile($nickname)

This method accepts users nickname as input and returns the list of all of the user’s subscriptions (people) and services connected to their account (Authentication required for private users)

fetch_user_rooms($nickname)

This method accepts users nickname as input and returns the list of all of the rooms to which the user can post (Authentication required for private users)

Download

You can download the Plugin file from my Plugin page and then upload it to your wp-contents directory.

If you are a WordPress Plugin developer, then you can check my FriendFeed API Core Plugin to find out how to integrate FriendFeed API with you own WordPress Plugins.

PS: Incidentally this is my first blog post from Windows Live Editor.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Quick tip for WordPress Plugin Developers

Published May 25, 2009 | In WordPress

Hello WordPress Plugin authors, here is a quick trick to link to the latest zip file of your Plugin hosted at the official WordPress Plugin directory.

In order to link to the latest zip file, you have to link to the zip file without the version number. Consider my Bulk Move WordPress Plugin. The latest version of the Plugin (at the time of writing) is 0.2. If you have to link to the latest zip file for download then you have to link to the following url http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/bulk-move.zip

Right now this url points to version 0.2 and in future if I update the Plugin to version 0.3 then this url will automatically be mapped to version 0.3.

I use the above format to link to the zip files of my Plugins hosted at WordPress Plugin repository from my blog. The advantage of this method is that, I don’t need to update my links every time I update my Plugin.

Hope you find this tip useful.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , | 1 Comment

WordPress Plugin Competition 2009

Published May 23, 2009 | In WordPress

If you are a seasoned (or just a budding) WordPress Plugin author, then here is your chance to show off some of your coding skills. Weblogs Tools Collection is conducting their annual WordPress Plugin Competition.

Dates

The competition began on May 1st and will run till July 31st, a total of three months. You have to develop a new WordPress Plugin and release it in the Plugin Competition blog before the end date.

Prizes

The list of prizes are yet to be released (waiting for sponsors), but there will be a minimum of $1000 for the winner.

Rules

The following are some of the important rules.

  • Should be GPL compatible
  • Compatible with WordPress 2.7 and above.
  • Be secure and use secure coding methods.
  • Should be made available through the WordPress Extend pages
  • Announced and discussed on the Plugin Competition Blog.
  • Preliminary support has to be provided to the public.

So guys, it’s time to sharpen your WordPress skills and all the best for the competition.

PS: I am working on a Plugin (my entry for the competition) and will release it soon. Stay tuned 🙂

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

Bulk Move 0.2

Published May 8, 2009 | In Plugin Releases

I just found that the bug which was in my Bulk Delete WordPress Plugin that deleted drafts in a particular category when only posts were selected was also present in my Bulk Move WordPress Plugin.

I have updated the Plugin with the fix for the bug and you can download it from the Plugin home page. I have also uploaded the Plugin to the official directory to make your update process painless.

If you want to only move posts from a category to another and not the drafts, then you need to update to the latest version.

Let me know if you find any issues with the Plugin.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

WpRecipes Contest

Published Apr 28, 2009 | In WordPress

WpRecipes.com recently crossed 3000 RSS subscribers and in order to celebrate that they are running a contest. The winners will get free WordPress managed hosting and membership to WordPress theme clubs. You can get more information from the contest page.

All you need to do to participate is to simply write WpRecipes (like this blog post) and post the link in the comments section of the contest page.

For the uninitiated WpRecipes is a blog with cool tips and tweaks about WordPress.

Update: Wow!! It seems that I have won the first prize in the contest. 🙂 I have won one year of free hosting from WPWebHost and one year subscription to Elegant Themes. I am waiting for the prizes to arrive and will try to post a review about them.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged | 4 Comments

Everyday learning’s as a web developer

Published Apr 27, 2009 | In Random/Personal, Web Programming

One of the good (and also bad) things in being a web developer is that you have to constantly keep (un)learning. Every time I learn a new trick (like changing the default editor in Ubuntu or searching Google efficiently) or get struck due to some bug or wired behavior, I used to document it here, so that I can refer to it later and also for that fact that it might be helpful for others who are searching for the same problem in Google.

Recently I found one such wired behavior in WordPress while retrieving the categories of a post. I wrote about it and almost forgot about it till I received a comment from a person called kaigou

Insert OMFG or variant thereof, about twenty times, at two in the morning. I’ve been fighting with WP all day to get it to do what I want, and the WP docs have been useless — maybe it’s just that most folks don’t really get into really doing wacky things like nested loops and whatnot, I suppose. I was about to give up when behold, the power of google dropped your post on my screen and NOW IT WORKS. I feel like a keyboard mash is due, or buying you a virtual drink, or SOMETHING. May have to settle for quietly dancing around the house in glee, given that it is two in the morning when most non-geeky souls are quietly abed. But not me! Must celebrate your awesomeness for helping me finally getting it to work! Thank you!!!

It was really a very nice feeling to know that you can make someone from the other side of the globe dance at 2 in the morning. 🙂

This comment has given me the much needed motivation to document the day-to-day learning’s of being a web developer. So guys, from now on, if I spend more than 5 minutes on fixing something I will document it here. I also strongly urge you guys to do the same thing in your blogs and if you don’t have a blog then you are always welcomed as a guest writer here 😉

Posted in Random/Personal, Web Programming | Tagged , , | 1 Comment