Tag Archives: WordPress

Year End Stats 0.3

Year End stats, my WordPress Plugin which displays some fancy stats about your blog, has been updated to 0.3

This version requires my Open Flash Chart Core Plugin to be installed and activated. Please note that you cannot use Year End Stats Plugin without activating Open Flash Chart Core Plugin. You can download Open Flash Chart Core Plugin from my Plugin page.

The major change in version 0.3 is the inclusion of flash based graphs (which you can save as image). You can see these graphs in action at Leau.net (First 4 images)

If you prefer only text data, you can continue to use version 0.2 but if you want visualize the data graphically, then you need to upgrade to version 0.3

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Integrate Open Flash Chart libraries with your WordPress Plugin

Open Flash Chart is an excellent Flash-based, open source charting component which can be used to create high-quality charts with ease. The advantage of using flash is that you can create professional quality charts with minimum effort, but the only disadvantage is that the user viewing the charts needs to have Adobe Flash Plugin installed in his browser.

It is released under open source and you are free to modify it if you know Flash and Action Script. If you are planning to start, then it has excellent tutorials and a huge array of libraries. Both Akismet stats and WordPress stats Plugin use this for displaying data in charts.

I was playing with Open Flash Chart, sometime ago and decided to use it for my Year End Stats WordPress Plugin. Instead of just including the required files with the Plugin, I separated them out into a separate WordPress Plugin so that it can be shared by other Plugins as well.

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 Year End Stats Plugin to find out how to integrate Open Flash Chart in your WordPress Plugin.

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PHP 4, WordPress 2.5 and BBPress 0.9

I just found a bug in WordPress 2.5, which is exposed when it is run in PHP 4.3.11. I thought of detailing about it here so that it will be useful for others who are seeking solution for the similar problem.

Recently I was trying to integrate WordPress and BBPress to make them share a single database and cookie. The advantage of this integration is that a logged in user can share the session between WordPress and BBPress.

Right now the latest version of BBPress is 0.9 and it can be integrated only with WordPress 2.5. Only BBPress 1.0 (which is in alpha) can be integrated with WordPress 2.7. There is an excellent tutorial by _ck_ which explains the reasons behind this and it also has a step by step guide to integrate them.

I tested this integration in my test server running PHP 5 and was able to do it within minutes. But when I tried to do it in another server running PHP 4.3.11, it was not working. After lot of head banging and hair picking, I found out that there is a bug in WordPress 2.5, which does not allow you to share the cookie with BBPress 0.9 under PHP 4.

The following is the technical detail about the bug. If you are not technically inclined, you can safely skip it. You only need to remember that you cannot integrate WordPress 2.5 and BBPress 0.9 in PHP 4, you have to use WordPress 2.5.1

Well for the brave hearts here is the explanation. πŸ™‚

In both WordPress and BBPress, the function wp_hash() is used to generate the hash, which is required to encrypt the cookie.

In WordPress 2.5, the function wp_hash() is defined in wp-includes/pluggable.php file as

function wp_hash($data) {
    $salt = wp_salt();

    if ( function_exists('hash_hmac') ) {
        return hash_hmac('md5', $data, $salt);
    } else {
        return md5($data . $salt);
    }
}

It checks whether the function hash_hmac()is present. If not it generates the hash using the function md5(). The problem is that hash_hmac() is present only in PHP 5 and WordPress includes a copy of hash_hmac() function in the wp-includes/compat.php file for backward compatibility.

But in BBPress, wp_hash() function is defined in bb-includes/pluggable.php as

function wp_hash($data) {
    $salt = wp_salt();

    return hash_hmac('md5', $data, $salt);
}

This bug is present in WordPress 2.5 and will only affect servers running PHP 4. So if you are running PHP 4 and want to integrate WordPress and BBPress, then you have to use WordPress 2.5.1 and not 2.5.

Hope this explanation saves some hair for someone somewhere, doing something similar. πŸ™‚

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Post2FF now supports scheduled posts

Yet another update to my Post2FF WordPress Plugin. Now the latest version (v0.5) supports scheduled posts too. You can download the latest version from my Plugin page.

Special thanks to Cmiper and Phill Price for reporting the bug. FriendFeed community really rocks! πŸ™‚

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

Updated my Post2FF WordPress Plugin

Just a quick note to let you know that I have updated my Post2FF WordPress Plugin to v0.4, which I released last week.

Now there is a new option to specify the number of images that needs to be posted to FriendFeed. Earlier, it was taking all the images, but now you can control the number of images that needs to be posted by specifying it in the options page.

post2ff WordPress Plugin Options page

post2ff WordPress Plugin Options page

You can download the new version from the Plugin page. Don’t forget to reactivate the Plugin after uploading.

As always let me know if you have any feedback/issues.

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WordPress to FriendFeed Plugin

Yesterday Thomas Hawk posted a message in FriendFeed saying that he is going to drop his blog from FriendFeed account and then going to manually share items, since FriendFeed posts blog posts without images.

There were lot of comments for that message and some felt that removing the blog from FriendFeed profile could result in identity loss.

I looked into FriendFeed API and found it to be very powerful and easy to use. So, using it I have created a WordPress Plugin, which will automatically post a message to your FriendFeed account with all the images in the post, every time you publish a new post in WordPress.

You can download the Plugin file from my Plugin page and then upload it to your wp-contents directory. Once activated, you have to enter your nickname and remote key in the settings page. You can get the remote key from FriendFeed API page.

Please note that currently it is only in the beta stage right now. I am planning to add more features to this Plugin, so if you have a nice feature in mind, let me know and I will try to implement it. Also let me know if you are facing any issues/bugs with the Plugin.

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

List of FriendFeed users who talk about WordPress

The nice folks at WPCandy have come up with a great idea to dedicate a day to thank everyone behind WordPress and also to encourage WordPress fans to blog about WordPress and share their favorite tips and tricks.

Today (July 1st ) is known as the unofficial WordPress day, where fans from all over the world can thank the people behind WordPress and also can express their love for WordPress. They are also running an event and have some nice giveaways. All you have to do is to let everyone know why you love WordPress by leaving a comment at WPCandy or write a blog post about WordPress.

So instead of writing a post explaining why and how I love WordPress (which I have already done), I thought of sharing some information which will be useful for people who are interested in WordPress. So here we go.. πŸ™‚

Sometime ago Weblog Tools Collection published a list of Twitter users whom you can follow to get updated information about WordPress.

Nowdays I use FriendFeed more than Twitter (I have to confess this sometime). So I tried to find their corresponding FriendFeed usernames so that I can subscribe to them. The following is the list with their real names first, followed by their Twitter user names and then followed by their FriendFeed usernames.

The following are some of my additions to the list which was not originally published by Weblog Tools Collection.

I will try to keep the list updated and let me know if you feel I need to add someone else to this list. Till then happy FriendFeeding and my heart felt thanks to Matt and the team for an excellent product without which this site may never exist πŸ™‚

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Happy Birthday, WordPress

Today WordPress (the blogging software which I love) has turned 5. I have been running this site on WordPress for nearly two and a half years now. Thanks to Matt and the other developers for a wonderful product.

PS: Frequent readers of my blog would have noticed that I am not very active these days; things are going fast in my personal life and the posting frequency will soon be normal. πŸ™‚

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Time to strip down again

Like 2006 and 2007, I am going to participate in this year’s CSS Naked day too. This year the date has been changed to April 9th.

If you are wondering what is CSS Naked day, then this is the definition from the official site

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>.

If even you want to participate then register your site in the official site and then strip the CSS from your site. If you are on WordPress then you can use this plugin.

Happy stripping πŸ˜‰

Posted in Events/Conferences | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

WordPress 2.5 is out

The wait is finally over. πŸ™‚ The most waited version of WordPress, Version 2.5 is out. WordPress 2.5 was in the making for nearly 6 months now and it has lot of new features and most importantly, changes to the admin screen. You can also view the screencast discussing the new admin pages from the WordPress development blog.

I am going to update my installation now and this blog might appear clunky while I am doing that. I have installed WordPress using svn so it is just a single shell command for me to update. Thanks to Joost, I converted my installation into a svn installation when WordPress 2.2.2 was released.

By the way this will be my last post using the old admin screens, I will post my experience with the new admin screens in a couple of days. Meanwhile if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, then I highly recommend you to update to WordPress 2.5. Happy upgrading πŸ˜‰

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , | 7 Comments