Lester Chan’s WordPress Plugins

Whenever WordPress releases a .1 update and it is during my school holidays (May to August) or (December to January). I am always able to get all my plugins compatible with it before it is actually released and have some buffer for testing.

I had spent the whole night yesterday making my plugins work wells with WordPress 2.6 and perhaps even WordPress 2.7 while maintaining the backward compatibility with WordPress 2.5.

All my 15 plugins are available at the Downloads Page under Beta Scripts. It used to be 16 plugins, but I stopped developing WP-Wap and hence it became 15.

Do help me test it out either on WordPress 2.5 or WordPress 2.6 Beta. They should work just fine for both versions.

This site is running all 15 of them and it is based on WordPress 2.5. If you found any of my plugins that are not working well on this site, do let me know as well. I will update this site to WordPress 2.6 when RC1 comes out.

If everything goes fine, I will release the updates 2 days after WordPress 2.6 is being released.

PS: My mom always nag at me to get a job especially during my 3 months (summer holidays) from May to August. But I told her by developing plugins, I can get donations as well. If you really like my plugins and appreciate my effort that I have put into it, do drop me a donation. My Paypal email is lesterchan AT gmail DOT com. Thank You =)

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!

WP-PostRatings is my only plugin left which still uses an external Javascript file in .php instead of .js.

Finally, I have gotten rid of .php and now the only two Javascript files in WP-PostRatings are in .js and best of all, they are packed using Dean Edward’s Packer. This will not only reduce the size of the Javascript file but also lessen the load on the server as .js files can be served as static files which requires no overhead in processing.

Changelog:

NEW: Renamed postratings-admin-js.php To postratings-admin-js.js and Move The Dynamic Javascript Variables To The PHP Pages
NEW: Renamed postratings-js.php To postratings-js.js and Move The Dynamic Javascript Variables To The PHP Pages
NEW: Uses postratings-js-packed.js And postratings-admin-js-packed.js

I need you guys to help me test WP-PostRatings 1.31 to ensure that it is working like normal as before.

Upgrading from WP-PostRatings 1.30 to WP-PostRatings 1.31 Beta 1 is very easy, just overwrite all the files will do. You do not need to run anything.

Thank You

  WP-PostRatings 1.40 Beta 1 (unknown, 5,300 hits)

PS: I have upgraded this site to WP-PostRatings 1.31 Beta 1, if there is any bug in the rating systems do let me know.

If you are using PHP 4 and using some of my plugins, the error message “Warning: cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode” will get displayed on your page. This is not a bug in my plugin but a bug in PHP 4 itself.

My recommendation would definitely be asking you to upgrade to PHP 5. PHP group has announced the end of life for PHP 4 on the 13th July 2007.

Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

As you can see, there would not be any more PHP 4 updates and security fixes will be available till 8th August 2008 which is only 2 more months. If you want to upgrade to PHP 5, this is the best time to do it.

If for some reasons you are not able to upgrade to PHP 5, the only thing you can do is to turn off error message display. You can refer to this thread for more information. This is definitely not an elegant solution.

If you host supports PHP 5 but you are on PHP 4, you can take a look at the solution posted by Thomas Arie Setiawan.

Softwares like MediaWiki which powered Wikipedia requires your server to be running PHP 5, and vBulletin has beginning asking customers to upgrade to PHP 5. It would be a matter of time before WordPress requires a minimum of PHP 5 to be running.

I have updated lesterchan.net to version 3.0. Do check it out =)

Here is the second and final wave of my June 2008 plugins update containing the remaining 4 plugins. All of them should work only on WordPress 2.5. It is not tested for any version below that.

The most general noticeable change would be the path to the plugin is now fixed. Previously it was nested in another folder and I got several hate mails because of that. Since the path problem has been solved, the Automatic Plugin Upgrade should work in theory.

Be sure to read the readme.html and checkout the changelog for more information and most importantly NOTE THE TABS AT THE TOP

WP-Ban 1.30
» Readme/Changelog
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-DBManager 2.30
» Readme/Changelog
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-DownloadManager 1.30
» Readme/Changelog
» Demo
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-PostViews 1.30
» Readme/Changelog
» Demo
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

You may also want to view Lester Chan’s WordPress Plugins June 2008 Update (Wave 1).

I have completed whatever I need to code for the remaining 4 plugins for Wave 2 release.

WP-Ban and WP-DBManager basically undergo only cosmetic changes to suite WordPress 2.5 layout.

I have added a few minor additions to WP-PostViews. The changes are documented in the Changelog tab in the readme.html file include in the zip

The plugin which undergo the most changes is WP-DownloadManager. It is the longest changelog that I have ever done. I also added a new search feature into WP-DownloadManager. You can see it in action in the Downloads Page.

See Lester Chan’s WordPress Plugins June 2008 Update (Wave 2).