Lester Chan’s WordPress Plugins

My good friend Ozh has written an article entitled, What Plugin Coders Must Know About WordPress 2.6. It is a good read if you are a plugin developer for WordPress.

Both of us have came to a conclusion that if you move your /wp-content/ folder to elsewhere, you may need to manually specify the path to wp-config.php in the respective plugins that make use of them as there is no 100% way of guessing the path to wp-config.php.

So my recommendation is DO NOT MOVE the /wp-content/ folder. It is OK to move wp-config.php to a level higher, but try not to touch /wp-content/.

With regards to my plugins, I will release a .01 update bringing the version to 1.31 and 2.31 for the respective plugins. This update will make sure that the plugin will work for BOTH WordPress 2.5 and WordPress 2.6. That is right, I will maintain backward compatibility with WordPress 2.5 for the next update as WordPress 2.6 is just a minor release.

When WordPress 2.7 comes out in November 2008, I will bump all the versions to 1.40 and 2.40 respectively and I will remove the backward compatibility feature to WordPress 2.5.

I spoke about Developing Plugins For WordPress on Wednesday, 18th June 2008 at the Singapore PHP User Group, June 2008 meetup.

This is the second time I am speaking at the user group. The first time was in December 2007 meetup where I spoke about the same topic WorPress Plugin Development With PHP.

I think this time my pace was slightly better.

By embedding this video, it breaks my site XHTML validation!

Powerpoint Slides and Source Code can be downloaded here.

I have downloaded WordPress 2.6 Beta 1 and installed it. Not much difference from WordPress 2.5 in terms of the layout.

Now on the extreme top menu on the extreme right, there is a link called “Speed up!” which links to Google Gears.

In the Dashboard, right under “Right Now”, there is a comment break down added to it. Here is an example: “You have 1 post, 1 page, contained within 1 category and 0 tags. Current comment break down: 1 total, 1 approved, 0 spam and 0 awaiting moderation.”

When you write a page or post, underneath the “Save” and “Published” button, there is a word count indicator.

The display of themes under “Available Themes” has also changed a little.

Now back to serious business.

I am still deciding whether or not to maintain WordPress 2.5 compatibility for the next wave of updates for my plugins as WordPress 2.6 introduces a lot of constants like “WP_PLUGIN_URL”, “WP_PLUGIN_DIR”
“WP_CONTENT_DIR”, “WP_CONTENT_URL”, etc.

2 potential issues that would break my plugin in WordPress 2.6 and I will be unable to fix it unless I find another way to do the AJAX, “Allow wp-config.php to exist one level up from WordPress root directory”
and “Allow wp-content directory to exist in a custom location (not relative to ABSPATH)“.

Argh! WordPress 2.5 has the shortest development cycle!

Ryan has announced the availability of WordPress 2.6 Beta 1. The final release of WordPress 2.6 should happen between 7th July 2008 to 14th July 2008 according to WordPress Trac’s Roadmap.

WordPress 2.6 is not a big release compared to WordPress 2.5, but hopefully it will not break any plugins as I just updated my plugins for WordPress 2.5.

I still think that WordPress should slow down their pace of development if not it will be hard for plugin authors to keep up with it as everytime a major version of WordPress comes out, plugins always breaks.

Here are the features of WordPress 2.6:

• Post Revisioning
• A “Press This” bookmarklet for tumblelog style quick posting
• Caching of static files with Gears for faster Admin page loads
• A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts
• Theme previewing as seen on WordPress.com
• Built-in word counting in the post editor
• The ability to disable remote publishing for the security conscious
• XML-RPC API for changing blog options
• Better SSL support for the Admin
• Hierarchy-aware paging in the Manage Pages and Manage Categories admin pages.
• The ability to relocate your content directory
• The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root
• Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
• Customizable default avatars
• Bulk delete, activate, and deactivate for plugins
• Check box range selection with shift-click
• TinyMCE 3.1.0.1 with lots of bug fixes
• jQuery 1.2.6 with some nice performance improvements
• jQuery UI 1.5
• Lots of bug fixes and performance improvements

Finally the feature of activating/deactivating plugins in bulk is here!

WordPress 2.5.1 has been released. It includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix.

If you are interested in only the security fixes, just replaced the following files.

1. /wp-includes/pluggable.php
2. /wp-admin/includes/media.php
3. /wp-admin/media.php

There are more than 70 bugs and performance fixes in 2.5.1, here is an outline of it:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

WordPress 2.5 has been released and WordPress.org has a refreshed look based on WordPress 2.5 new redesigned administration backend.

New User Features in WordPress 2.5

• Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard
• Dashboard Widgets
• Multi-file upload with progress bar
• Bonus: EXIF extraction
• Search posts and pages
• Tag management
• Password strength meter
• Concurrent editing protection
• Few-click plugin upgrades
• Friendlier visual post editor
• Built-in galleries

New Developer Features in WordPress 2.5

• Salted passwords
• Secure cookies
• Easy taxonomy and URL creation
• Inline documentation
• Database optimization
• $wpdb->prepare()
• Media buttons
• Shortcode API

Download: WordPress 2.5

I have upgraded this site to WordPress 2.5.

WordPress 2.5 RC 2 has been released alongside with a short screencast covering the new dashboard and uploader and Release Candidate 2.

I will be holding on to the upgrade to RC2 as the gold version will be out before end of this week.

Download: WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate 2

The time I have been waiting for to test my plugins on WP 2.5 is finally here.

Some features in WordPress 2.5 taken from WordPress.org:

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times.

Do take a look at WordPress.org’s blog - Sneak Peak on WordPress 2.5.

Download: WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate 1

*UPDATE* Just updated this site to WordPress 2.5 RC1, apparently all my plugins seems to be working fine. Just that some alignment and colour scheme maybe a little off. I will try to fix it latest during my summer holidays.

Accordingly to Lorelle, WordPress 2.5 will be released before WordCamp Dallas.
As taken from WordCamp Dallas website:

The Dallas 2008 WordCamp spans two days, with the first day focusing primarily on general user topics and the second day primarily on developer topics, with some overlap.

In this case, WordPress 2.5 should be out on either 28th March 2008 or 29th March 2008.

WordPress 2.5 has been delayed till 17th March 2008 tentatively. I find the development cycle for WordPress 2.5 is a little weird.

For WordPress 2.3 and other previous versions of WordPress, betas and RCs are released first. For example, WP 2.3: Beta 1, WP 2.3: Beta 2, WP 2.3: Beta 3 and lastly WP 2.3: RC 1 are released first before WP 2.3 went gold.

For WordPress 2.5, there are so such releases (I am not talking about SVN nightly) and apparently the upcoming WP 2.5 will be the first and gold release.

Personally, I think they should release the betas and RCs officially first before releasing the gold version to the public.

But I still hope it get further delayed till my summer holidays so I can release it together with my plugins as I am too busy with school that I could not even take any time off to do my plugins.