Plugins – Page 7 – Lester Chan's WordPress Plugins

Beta Version Of My Plugins Updated To WordPress 2.6

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 =)

(60 votes, average: 3.87 out of 5)

My Plugins With WordPress 2.6 Part 2

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.

(37 votes, average: 3.86 out of 5)

My Plugins With WordPress 2.6 Beta

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!

(54 votes, average: 3.72 out of 5)

WP-PostRatings 1.31 Beta 1

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

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.

(168 votes, average: 3.93 out of 5)

Warning: cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode

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.

(79 votes, average: 3.73 out of 5)