Me and my Mac

Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

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.

Events 1.5.7.1

Minor update to fix deletion of events on non-standard blogs. Non-standard meaning that the prefix in the database is not wp_ if your blog has this prefix this version won’t change anything for you. If your prefix is different or not used at all. This will fix allows you to delete events.

More information:
http://meandmymac.net/plugins/events/

Download:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-events.1.5.7.1.zip

Discussion thread:
http://forum.at.meandmymac.net/topic/events-not-deleting

Events 1.5.7

Yes yes, another update. Some fixes, some internal changes. And we’re slowly progressing to version 1.6. The most important change in this version is that i have removed a check for wordpress tables. This leaves Events a bit more vulnerable since WordPress suppresses errors with all it’s might.
However, i think i’ve got that covered pretty well.

Instead of having Events check if the 2 database tables are still there on every page load it now only checks on the dashboard. If they are not available (removed/unreadable) on the website itself it just says there are no events shown as if everything is normal but there are no events. On the dashboard however it shows some obvious big errors and prevents you from doing anything with Events on the Mange > Events dashboard. Instructions on how to fix it are also shown there.

Some minor bug fixes are also fixed, templates are now properly assigned to the various lists. $cat is now optional for the sidebar, this allows the old behavior without breaking the new options. And apparently when a title for an event was a link and longer than your set limit it broke the sidebar. This also is fixed.

Changelog:
[fix] Template usage for archive and today’s list now works properly
[fix] $cat value now optional for sidebar
[fix] Longer titles as a link no longer breaks the sidebar
[change] Revised auto-removal code to use timezones also
[change] Events and Categories have their own notification on removal now
[change] Events no longer checks for mysql tables on every page load
[change] Checking for tables and error reporting done in the dashboard
[change] Events now uses register_activation_hook() for installation

More information:
http://meandmymac.net/plugins/events/

Download:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-events.1.5.7.zip

Events 1.5.6

Just out, events 1.5.6

A lot of fixes regarding timezones, times and everything related.
A rewrite of timezone support was done with the help of Rick P.

Changelog:
[fix] All-day events show a countdown again
[change] completely revamped timezone support (Thanks Rick)
[new] Choose what the sidebar outputs in settings
[fix] All-day support for events_list
[change] Events now uses the WordPress native timezone thing
[new] sidebar() as a function in PHP now accepts a category and amount value
[fix] Deletion of events (for some it didn’t work, apparently)
[update] Dashboard settings
[update] Revised add/edit form

More information:
http://meandmymac.net/plugins/events/

Download:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-events.1.5.6.zip

Have fun!

Events 1.5.5

Bugfix release and some minor changes that should improve the stability and performance of the plugin overall.

Changes:
[change] default sorting in manage events is now descending
[fix] Sidebar now uses the right setting for language links
[fix] Events can be added again (broke in 1.5.4)
[fix] Supposed theme bug fixed (precaution) on the management dashboard
[change] Universal output builder for lists (saves lots of code)

More information:
http://meandmymac.net/plugins/events/

Download:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-events.1.5.5.zip

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.

Secrets 0.3 (0.3.2)

New secrets have been added, head over to the plugin page for more information.

More information:
http://meandmymac.net/plugins/secrets/

Download:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/secrets.0.3.2.zip

A small update:
A bug preventing the plugin updates to disable is now fixed. Also the explanations on the dashboard have been improved.

Randimage 0.4

On popular request images can no optionally be linked to the post they’re in. Instead of linking to the image itself.

More information:
http://meandmymac.net/plugins/randimage/

Download:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/randimage.0.4.zip

So Wordpress silently approved my plugin after all!

Usually when you submit a new plugin to the repositories you get an email after a few days telling you it’s either approved and thus added or not.

If it’s approved they also send the required information to me to upload the thing and where to stick the files. I never got such an email for the last plugin, Secrets, and since it silently was removed from the “add your plugin” page i assumed it had been denied.

I saw no reason for denying my plugin so i went on to re-submit it. But got an error it was already in use… Looking up the name told me there was indeed a Secrets plugin and it bore my name…
Why didn’t they tell me!!

Anyway, without further ado, here is Secrets:
http://meandmymac.net/plugins/secrets/

A plugin to remove certain filters and actions from Wordpress or add them to it.

Currently there are only 2 “secrets” but you can submit usefull additions:
http://forum.at.meandmymac.net/forum/secrets
And with that make the plugin completely awesome.