Plugins Structure Changes

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

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.

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (49 votes, average: 3.71 out of 5)

David Potter’s WordPress Plugin Reviews

David Potter has reviewed several WordPress themes and plugins and you can find those reviews here.

He as reviewed 4 of my plugins namely WP-Email, WP-Print, WP-PostViews and WP-DownloadManager.

His reviews are all very detailed, go check them out.

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (86 votes, average: 3.70 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.

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (80 votes, average: 3.70 out of 5)

WordPress 2.9 Beta 2

WordPress 2.9 Beta 2 has been released.

I tested my plugins on WordPress 2.9 Beta 1 and it all works without any problem. I don’t think I will have time to release any updates till I get back from my holiday at the end of December 2009. Having said that, the current version of my plugin should work fine with WordPress 2.9 as well.

Download: WordPress 2.9 Beta 2
View: Changes Since Beta 1

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (137 votes, average: 3.69 out of 5)