Me and my Mac

Posts Tagged ‘plugins’

What the fuck is going on…

It seems there are some issues with late new installs of WordPress. Namely 2.6.2 and 2.6.3. It seems functions are declared twice, resulting in the plugin not activating and tags not working. Or the plugin not activating at all.

As found on my forum:
here here and here and here also

Obviously i’ve done some research as to what is going wrong. And to be honest, i have no idea.
I have multiple servers in different hosting companies and my own localhost server to test stuff on and all work just fine. Also there is ofcourse my own website (this one). And also here it works fine. That doesn’t necessarily mean everything is alright, but it does mean i cannot reproduce the errors reported and thus cannot fix it. However, and i work in support a lot, i know how my software works, i know how wordpress works so logic tells me people are doing stuff wrong… Not to put the blame on you but that’s just what the situation tells me. On the other hand i doubt all of the sudden people are making mistakes like this and frankly what can go wrong on clicking activate for a plugin. Not much i think. So i have no clue, yet.
I’ve tried several installations on NEW wordpress setups and am working on WP2.7 on my local server to test plugins and make them work with it. Most things work as expected. Everything seems to work as it should on Wordpress 2.6.x.

Any information is welcome. Direct it to the forum please so we can all benefit from offered tips, solutions and all that.

WordPress 2.7 and my plugins!

So I installed WordPress 2.7 today to see if my plugins work with it. It seems most functions remain usable. But due to WP’s upcoming Dashboard changes many features in Events and Adrotate will either be hard to find or collide with other functions and forms.

This is being worked on. And me and a buddy came up with the following:
Starting with WordPress 2.7 I will be adding a new plugin to all existing plugins. This new Plugin. For now named ‘AJ Suite’ Will handle all menus from then on.

This means that all my plugins will be gathered in one menu starting with WordPress 2.7. Here is a quick mockup:
As you can see it’s not a mess. The red circle are the Settings for the plugins. If there are any, it will be in the Settings menu. The blue circle however, is the actual plugin and as you can see i am testing this with the EasyBan and Events plugin at first.

Basically what AJ Suite does is create a new menu for other plugins. Preferably mine.
I encourage other developers to create a setup like this. Especially if they have multiple plugins. A more detailed set up/proposal will follow later. This will include some examples and ideas for others to be inspired by.

More updates will follow later once i have all plugins prepped.
One con though about all this is that due to the many changes in WordPress Dashboard all support for older versions of WP is dodgy at best. And therefor will not be supported anymore! So make sure you upgrade to WordPress 2.7 once it’s out. The other way around it’s the same, the updated versions of the plugins will most likely not work well with WordPress 2.6 or older and will also not be supported on those versions. However, since the AJ Suite plugin aims to be backward compatible i expect little trouble there.

Where is WordPress heading? Idiocy to the max!

The devs have some weird ideas lately. And to be honest, while they do a great job, i like Wordpress less and less ever since 2.5 was introduced. Too much automation going on in there. Bah

What the hell is up with autosaving and revisions of posts. Not a bad feature per se, but make it optional please! It clogs up the database making it expand exponentially if you leave the browser open for a while.

And which idiot thought up that plugins should be automatically updated. But didn’t think about the problems it would bring. Many plugins are poorly written. Even more plugins require database additions from time to time. And NO plugin i ever seen has had a proper upgrade script or routine. It has to be done by hand. So, a few months ago when i released Events nearly every week and it required a bunch of new fields for storing that stuff. An automatic update would have been disasterous. As some of my users found out. Obviously because the database didn’t get updated. It had to be done manually. And as many of us know. Adding fields to a database is harder than uploading a few damn files. So while we’re at it. Just upload them your self and use the upgrade instructions the plugin maker provides. It’s makes your life just less annoying.

Another thing. Why can’t Wordpress show proper errors. Sometimes i encounter a plugin that won’t activate. Sometimes i screw up and break my own plugin. All fine. But with the error “A fatal error occured” i don’t know where to look. Give me the original PHP error dammit. And no WP_DEBUG does not work. I tried that and it made apache cry and me frustrated because it generated so much errors i couldn’t even find my own anymore. So no… Just provide proper errors.

Why is the Richtext editor still acting up. It has been around for years. It has been used by millions and still it’s stripped down, broken and useless for anything else than dumb typing of text. most plugins break because of it stripping out tags and stuff. We cannot add forms, we cannot add tables or anything else that requires more than bold or italic text formatting. It sucks!

Why the assumption that we need Windows Livewriter support. Make it optional! I don’t even use Windows. Why include a link to use Turbo on every dashboard page. What is Turbo anyway. Useless, no one uses Google Gears. I much rather have that option in Settings > Misc where i don’t see it.

Blah!

All in all Wordpress isn’t that bad. Truth be told… I still enjoy using Wordpress, most of the time. But some things just piss me off. Especially if they do not work right or make no sense. It’s becoming a fool proof system, which for me, a sort-off nerd, is crazy. I like some things to be done manually, i like to be in control of my own website. It’s getting less and less of that. Even at the point that i need to write plugins to disable the new automated stuff and hack things out to make it work as i like it. Yuk.

Is my site hard to use or navigate?

It seems a lot of people have trouble finding the right stuff on my site. Or they just are way to lazy to read and thus go through a series of steps which take much more time…

If you’re upgrading a plugin read the damn documentation. If you’re new to the plugins, read the damn documentation also!

Also with every plugin there is a included readme with either instructions or links to instructions! It’s not very hard! And very easy, really!

I spend time on making proper instructions so every idiot can do it. I try to provide detailed steps for everyone to upgrade the plugins you use and yet you do not get it and run to the forums and ask the same over and over again. I know i know. That’s how support works and that’s how life goes. But damn, if you just read my upgrade instructions. I think it’s pretty clear.

If it’s not… I’m sorry, but let me know what’s up. Where do you get stuck or what do you not understand about it? How can i improve it?

Also, on a regular basis i get questions about the capabilities of the plugins. “can it do that, can it do this”.
Let me tell you: If it’s in the features it can, otherwise not.
If you want it to do something that is not listed. Yes, you can place a feature request on the forum. But read the damn feature list and description instead of just running to the forum immediately and ask for things that are very clearly stated on the plugins page or on the FAQ on the forum.

Again, if you have read it. Where is it unclear and how can i improve it?

Asking around has resulted in everyone (so far) thinking my site is really really easy to navigate even if they don’t even use wordpress or have the slightest clue what, for example, the events plugin is they could find the information i asked them to look up. I don’t see why you cannot find it. But hey, that’s just me. So let me know if there is anything you have trouble with.
Or otherwise, read the manuals!

Forums forums forums!

In the light of better support i thought we need a forum. I have 9 plugins now and expect quite some downloads from that. Therefor also people are going to ask questions and a series of silly guestbook style pages just won’t cut it then.

So today i invested in setting up bbPress on a subdomain. I have removed the *original* support pages and moved the FAQ’s to the forums too. All over the website the links have been updated and the Wordpress Repositories are up to date.

You can find the forums at http://forum.at.meandmymac.net. Have fun!

And damn bbPress is a bitch to set up… Clearly it’s not a finished product and i kept bumping into errors, bugs or weird stuff all day. But i managed to get it working with some help from _ck_ over at #bbpress. I had to alter a few plugins and am thinking about creating some of my own as bbPress is all it’s lightness, just misses some features and the current plugins won’t fill the gap. But all in all i think i have put together a decent forum with most functions available.

Do i actually use all of my plugins?

Yes, i do…

Except for EasyBan i actively have all plugins in use to some extent. HiddenMedia was more of a testing thing for shortcode but i use it in one post none the less. Even AdRotate is used. You can see ads on most of the pages and posts promoting my plugins and selling one adspace.
Events has it’s own page and sits in the sidebar right below RandImage.

CustomQuery lies at the plugin managers feet waiting for queries and Worthless Plugin is being useless all day, happily. Currently it’s set to allow you here, but when maintenance is needed i close the site just as easy with AccessQontrol. My support pages show you Alternate Comment Form in action.

So you see… I make good use of most plugins. And you should too!

Wordpress plugin directory and autoupgrade mayhem!

Peoples! please! Do not use the automatic upgrade thing for plugins! Especially not if you didn’t update it manually in the past few months.

Please be aware that many changes are made over the past time (months/weeks) and chances are that when you use the automated upgrade thing for plugin you do more harm than good because of changes in how the data is stored. This is especially true for the Events and AdRotate plugin.

On the bright side; Both plugins pretty much have all the features they need and will not likely receive any new features that require changes in the database tables. So if you update manually this once, chances are you can update automatically from here on in!

yay!

Note that this does not apply for the RandImage plugin and Alternate Comment Form. These 2 do not have a database table.

Numbers numbers

I just did a quick count. All plugins combined have over 148000 characters of code. Thats an average of 24727 characters per plugin. However, the smallest plugins only is 1488 characters. The largest goes over 76000 characters.

*yawn*

All plugins updated for the new site.

All plugins received a minor update to have the appropriate links for the new website.

Downloads:
wp-events v0.9.4.1
wp-easyban v1.2.3.1
accessqontrol v0.2.1
alt-comment-form v1.0.1