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 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.

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).

All my plugins will undergo a structure change to accommodate the Official WordPress Plugins Repository. This is also a much requested feature for most of my users as they complained that the zip file generated by WordPress Plugins Repository was 2 level deep and they got some issues when installing the plugin and the official plugin update notification will not work.

As posted in WordPress Ideas:

Some of us the older plugin authors are facing problem/hassle of restructuring the our plugin structure as our plugin name need not necessary follow the official plugin name folder naming convention.

And when user download the file from the repository, it will be the <official plugin name>\<plugin name>\<plugin>.php

As this is a major change, things will break, so I need you guys help to help me test it. The first plugin that rolls out this structure update will be WP-Polls.

The structure change for wp-polls involves:

1. Using /wp-polls/ folder instead of /polls/
2. Using wp-polls.php instead of polls.php
3. Using wp-polls-widget.php instead of polls-widget.php
4. Replacing all the old references with the new references stated above

  WP-Polls 2.40 Beta 1 (unknown, 7,167 hits)

Please kindly post any bugs found in WP-Polls Support Forum. Thank You.

I will roll out this updates to the rest of the plugins in December 2007/January 2008.

WordPress 2.3 Beta 3 has been released, but this time I think I will wait for the RC which is due next Monday before updating this site.

- Download WordPress 2.3 Beta 3

WordPress 2.3 Beta 2 has been released and this site has been updated to it.

- Download WordPress 2.3 Beta 2

WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 has been released. I will update this site once I have updated my plugins to be compatible with it.

- Download WordPress 2.3 Beta 1