The Xavisys WordPress Plugin Framework

A few months ago I was chatting with Joost de Valk and he was talking about a new plugin toolkit that he was making. The basic idea was to make a flexible base that he could use to build on for all his plugins. It would handle all the tasks that are common to all his plugins (options page, dashboard widget, etc) and still be easily extended so each plugin could handle more specific tasks as well. Now his plugins (at least some of them) use his toolkit.

It was a great idea, and I finally got around to writing one for my own plugins. I built it as an abstract class (and a tiny CSS file) that I extend for each plugin. Here you’ll get to see a quick tour of what the framework does. Let me know in the comments if you’re interested in seeing a walkthrough of how it was built, and feel free to download Efficient Related Posts to see it in action.

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Efficient Related Posts 0.3.4 Released

We just released version 0.3.4 of the Efficient Related Posts plugin for WordPress. It uses the new Xavisys Plugin Framwork (I’ll post more info on that soon), which gives it a nice new options page, links to the support forums, etc. We also did a lot of the work toward internationalizing it, and hopefully it will be fully translatable int he next version (coming soon).

If you want to request a feature, or need support, go to the Efficient Related Posts Support Forum. More information is available on the Efficient Related Posts page.

Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.3 Released

The new Twitter Widget Pro support forum has turned up some great ideas and has helped catch some easily missed bugs. This latest release of Twitter Widget Pro includes a bugfix that removes a duplicate closing tag for the title link, which was caught by someone in the forums, as well as an enhancement that makes the date format a per-widget setting (also suggested int he forums).

If you want to request a feature, or need support, go to the Twitter Widget Pro Forum. For more information, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page.

Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.2 Released

There was a small formatting issue introduced in Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.0 where there were no spaces between the tweet and meta data or between the date of the tweet and where the tweet was from (such as “from TweetDeck”). When I added the shortcode functionality I had to remove a lot of the excess whitespace so that the formatting built in to WordPress didn’t mess up the formatting of the widget when it was embedded in a post or page. I just released version 2.1.2 that fixed the spacing without messing up the formatting for the shortcodes.

I also added in some links to the WordPress Twitter Widget Pro Support Forum to make it easier for you to ask questions or make suggestions or requests. For more information, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page.

Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.1 Released

Recently, a Twitter Widget Pro user (alx) asked on the support forum for a new feature. He wanted to be able to have all the links open in a new window, and that’s a great idea! I just released version 2.1.1 of Twitter Widget Pro with this exact feature. If you want to request a feature, or need support, go to the Twitter Widget Pro Forum. For more information, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page.

10 Great WordPress Plugins

One of the greatest things about WordPress is how extensible it is through it’s plugin system. There’s a plugin for almost everything. There are more than 4,400 plugins just in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory and there are plenty more that aren’t in the directory. Unfortunately, sometimes there are so many plugins that it makes it hard to find the best WordPress plugins in the massive sea of options. Here are some of my favorite overall plugins.

1. Akismet
2. Simple Trackback Validation
3. Headspace2
4. Clean Slugs
5. Google XML Sitemaps
6. Twitter Widget Pro
7. WP Super Cache
8. Sociable
9. Subscribe to Comments
10. Twitter Tools

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Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.0 Released

I just tagged a new version of Twitter Widget Pro which includes an oft-requested feature, a twitter-widget shortcode. You can now embed a twitter widget into any post or page by simply dropping in a shortcode like [twitter-widget username="xavisys"] to embed a widget like this:

To read more about how to use the shortcodes and to download the plugin, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page. For support, go to the Twitter Widget Pro Forum

CSS Trick: Turning a background image into a clickable link

One of the things I most often get asked by people trying to master HTML and CSS is “How do I make a background image clickable?” It’s easy to wrap a regular image tag in a link, but what if your design or situation required that you use a background image? It’s actually quite simple. Just follow these steps and I’ll show you how to make a clickable background image like this:

Xavisys Website Development

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How To Make Your Own WordPress Widget

In this article, I’m going to show you how to write a simple plugin that adds a new widget to WordPress. We’ll be using the new WP_Widget class, which is the newest method but means that the widget will only work in WordPress 2.8+. I know that 2.8 isn’t actually out yet, but it will be soon and there’s no sense in learning the old method.

The widget we’ll be creating will display upcoming posts (scheduled posts). A lot of sites schedule posts to automatically publish at a specific time, helping them keep a steady flow of articles. I know that I use this trick on Web Developer News and Attackr, and I’ll use it on this site as soon as I get some more articles written. Since the articles are already there and ready to be posted, why not tease them and give your readers something to look forward to? That’s exactly what this widget will do.

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Howto: Create and Stream a CSV with PHP

I find myself constantly creating csv files for users to download. Whether it’s a method for users to export their data to excel, a way for users to backup their hosted data, or just a simple way to send them report information, csv files are extremely useful. Normally I just create an actual file and link to it for the user to download. The files are usually cleaned up after a certain amount of time or after a certain number of newer files exist.

Recently however, I had a client that really wanted to be able to export data in csv format without ever creating a file on the webserver. Their concern was rooted in security, but the reality of the matter was that they were trying to obey the letter of the law with regards to company policies. Whether it was truly necessary or not is for another discussion. Instead, the technique is actually very useful so I thought I’d share.

The key to this is that the fopen function supports php input/output streams as wrappers.

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