Xavisys» » plugin

Twitter Widget Pro 1.2.2 Released!

Aaron D. Campbell — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:59:24 +0000

I just uploaded version 1.2.2 of my WordPress Twitter Widget Pro plugin. Since twitter has slowed down, a lot of people (especially on slower servers) have been getting the “Could not connect to Twitter” message when twitter was slow but not down. I’ve added a setting on each widget to specify the number of seconds to wait for Twitter. It still defaults to 2 seconds, but you may have to bump it up. Just remember that when twitter IS down, it will try for that full amount of time to reach them BEFORE your page loads, so don’t set it too high!

Please discuss this plugin on the Wordpress Twitter Widget post.

WordPress Google Analytics 1.2.2 Released!

Aaron D. Campbell — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:50:24 +0000

I just uploaded version 1.2.2 of my WordPress Google Analytics plugin. It squashes one major bug that has been plaguing some users. Those that switch back and forth from visual to HTML editor, will not longer have problems with it getting stuck!

Please discuss this plugin on the WordPress Google Analytics Plugin post.

WordPress Twitter Widget Pro 1.2.1 released!

Aaron D. Campbell — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:53:11 +0000

I just uploaded version 1.2.1 of my WordPress Twitter Widget Pro plugin. It includes the removal of the “friends feed” option, the addition of custom error message setting for when Twitter is down, and optional anonymous statistics collection (more on this in a moment). Unfortunately, the database query that Twitter had to run to retrieve these feeds was contributing to their constant crashes. They have removed this functionality, and have no immediate plans to add it back. If they ever do, I’ll redo the plugin to use it. I’m sorry, but it’s completely out of my hands.

Regarding the anonymous statistics collection, as my plugins are getting more and more popular (1000s of users now), I’m struggling to keep in touch with my plugin users. Gathering some statistics will help me to design my plugins to meet the needs of the users. This is not meant as an invasion of privacy, and you can easily disable it from the options page.

Here is the data it collects and sends:

Plugin Name: I plan to eventually add this to more of my plugins, so this is used for me to tell sort the data by plugin.
Unique identifier: This is a hash (one way encryption) of the URL and a random number. This simply helps eliminate duplicate info from being added to the pool of data.
Plugin Version: Just the version of the plugin.
PHP Version: Most of my plugins require PHP 5+, but not all of them and I would like to update the ones that don’t. I’m hoping to see how many users are on an old version of PHP.
MySQL Version: Certain database queries can be vastly optimized on newer versions of MySQL, so this information could be very helpful.
Server Software: Microsofts IIS can cause a lot of problems for PHP applications, so knowing how many users are using IIS is important.
Memory Limit: Your web server puts a limit on the amount of memory a script can use. This plugin should never come close to an average memory limit, but this is a statistic that will be nice to keep in mind as new plugins are developed.

For those that want to know, here is the code that collects the data:

$s['plugin'] = 'Twitter Widget Pro';
$s['id'] = $this->get_id();
$s['version'] = TWP_VERSION;

$s['php_version'] = phpversion();
$s['mysql_version'] = @mysql_get_server_info($wpdb->dbh);
$s['server_software'] = $_SERVER["SERVER_SOFTWARE"];
$s['memory_limit'] = ini_get('memory_limit');

Please discuss this plugin on the WordPress Twitter Widget

Google Analytics plugin 1.2.0 released!

Aaron D. Campbell — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 02:31:45 +0000

A quick bugfix on the activation routines that generate the installation ID, released as 1.2.1.

I just uploaded version 1.2.0 of my WordPress Google Analytics plugin. It includes some minor bug fixes, and updated options page, and optional anonymous statistics collection. As my plugins are getting more and more popular (1000s of users now), I’m struggling to keep in touch with my plugin users. Gathering some statistics will help me to design my plugins to meet the needs of the users. This is not meant as an invasion of privacy, and you can easily disable it from the options page.

Here is the data it collects and sends:

Plugin Name: I plan to eventually add this to more of my plugins, so this is used for me to tell sort the data by plugin.
Unique identifier: This is a hash (one way encryption) of the URL and a random number. This simply helps eliminate duplicate info from being added to the pool of data.
Plugin Version: Just the version of the plugin.
PHP Version: Most of my plugins require PHP 5+, this one does not, but I would like to update it. I’m hoping to see how many users are on an old version of PHP.
MySQL Version: Certain database queries can be vastly optimized on newer versions of MySQL, so this information could be very helpful.
Server Software: Microsofts IIS can cause a lot of problems for PHP applications, so knowing how many users are using IIS is important.
Memory Limit: Your web server puts a limit on the amount of memory a script can use. This plugin should never come close to an average memory limit, but this is a statistic that will be nice to keep in mind as new plugins are developed.

For those that want to know, here is the code that collects the data:

$s['plugin'] = 'WP Google Analytics';
$s['id'] = wpGoogleAnalytics::get_wgaId();
$s['version'] = WGA_VERSION;

$s['php_version'] = phpversion();
$s['mysql_version'] = @mysql_get_server_info($wpdb->dbh);
$s['server_software'] = $_SERVER["SERVER_SOFTWARE"];
$s['memory_limit'] = ini_get('memory_limit');

Please discuss this plugin on the WordPress Google Analytics Plugin post.

Gallery Widget Pro

Aaron D. Campbell — Sat, 31 May 2008 02:59:51 +0000

I finally released another one of my plugins. This one is a widget that displays rotating images from a post’s gallery in the sidebar of your site. You just specify the post or page in the widget settings, and it will cycle through all the images from the gallery of that post or page. You can even have as many of them as you want on your site simultaneously! As usual, this plugin requires PHP5, and the latest WordPress (currently 2.5.1).

As many of you may have read, WordPress 2.6 will include another plugin of mine (built into the CORE) to allow you to reorder your images to make them display in whatever order you prefer. Until then, go get my Reorder Gallery plugin! They work great together!

WordPress Reorder Gallery Plugin

Aaron D. Campbell — Thu, 15 May 2008 23:28:23 +0000

When I talked about my first impressions of WordPress 2.5 I mentioned the new shortcodes. Then I went more in depth, as I explained exactly what WordPress Shortcodes were, and how they worked. However, neither time did I mention that there is a shortcode that is built into WordPress (no plugin needed). It’s the gallery shortcode. You can upload images to the post, and then choose to “Insert gallery into post” and it will add a [gallery] tag to your post, which will be replaced with the image gallery when people view it. The problem? Images are stuck in whatever order you upload them in.

This all works great for most people, but I had a client, LifeStory Photography, that wanted to use a flip-book style album to display her photography. The problem was that she needed to regularly reorder the images in her gallery (yes, that flipbook uses the [gallery] shortcode and modifies how it works), and there is no way to re-order the images. This plugin solves that. There is a way to manually set the order using a number (lower is near the beginning, higher is toward the end) in the image details, or you can simply drag and drop to order the images how you want them to appear.

Google Maps for Wordpress

Aaron D. Campbell — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:17:32 +0000

Warning: This plugin was affected by Trac ticket 6444, which was fixed in WordPress 2.5.1, so get 2.5.1!

The Google Maps for WordPress plugin allows you to easily insert Google maps into your blog, making use of the new shortCode system in WordPress 2.5. The maps can be configured to offer directions to or from the location, show or hide the zoom/pan controls, show/hide map type, activate zoom using mouse wheel, and more.

It requires a Google Maps API key, and then gives you a nice interface near your editor to help you build the map and send it to the editor.

Wordpress Twitter Widget

Aaron D. Campbell — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:09:13 +0000

My latest plugin is a sidebar widget that handles Twitter feeds. It’s true that you could just point and RSS widget at one of the Twitter feeds, but you end up with the whole tweet (I honestly don’t know what they are called) as a link, @replies don’t function, etc. Twitter Widget Pro properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link parsing, feeds that include friends or just one user, and can even display profile images for the users. It’s set up like the RSS widgets, so you can have as many of as you want on your sidebars.

I currently have my twitter feed in the right sidebar, showing the last five tweets, and Kevin Rose’s feed (with friends) in the left sidebar, showing profile images along with each of the last 10 tweets.

I tried to make everything easily styled, so there are no built-in styles. If you don’t know exactly what you need, here is what I’m using on this site:

/**
 * Twitter Widget
 */
.widget_twitter li {
	clear:both;
}
.widget_twitter li img {
	float:left;
	margin-right:.5em;
}
.widget_twitter li .clear {
	clear:both;
}

Changelog

04/23/2008: 1.1.0

Most major fix is the inclusion of json_decode.php for users that don’t have json_decode() which was added in PHP 5.2.0
Fixed problem with displaying a useless li when profile images aren’t displayed on a single user widget
Default title is now set to “Twitter: UserName”

04/17/2008: 1.0.0

Released to wordpress.org repository

04/14/2008: 0.0.3

Fixed some of the settings used with Snoopy
Set a read timeout for fetching the files

04/14/2008: Version 0.0.2

Changed some function names
Moved form display to a separate function (_showForm)
Now uses wp_parse_args to handle defaults
Added comments to the code
Added seconds to the _timeSince function so you can have something like “about 25 seconds ago”

Validate Empty Wordpress Posts/Pages

Aaron D. Campbell — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 21:34:03 +0000

Empty posts/pages in wordpress still get wrapped in tags, which makes them invalid. This plugin fixes that.

Wordpress Mark Parent Pages Plugin

Aaron D. Campbell — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:40:15 +0000

Update: This plugin is not needed in 2.5, it has been included in the WordPress core.

This plugin uses DOM to add a class (current_page_ancestor) to the li tag of each page that is an ancestor of the current one. With a little CSS, you can have nice collapsing menus. This code assumes that your pages are listed using the usual wp_list_pages function, and that they are in an element with the id of nav.

#nav ul li.current_page_item ul,
#nav ul li.current_page_ancestor ul {
    display:block;
}
#nav ul li.current_page_item ul ul {
    display:none;
}

I wanted collapsing menus in Wordpress, not Javascript based, but something that would display only top level pages AND pages that are either children of the current page or children of the ancestors of the current page. It may sound confusing, but it’s really quite logical. Take a look:

Given a page structure like this:

Web Programming
> Wordpress
> > Themes
> > > CSS
> > > JavaScript
> > > PHP
> > Plugins
> > Functions
> CubeCart
> Gallery
Templates
> Free Designs
Portfolio
> Sites
About
Contact

On the main page, I’d like to display all the top level pages: Web Programming, Templates, Portfolio, About, Contact

On page ‘Web Programming’ I would like to display:

Web Programming
> Wordpress
> CubeCart
> Gallery
Templates
Portfolio
About
Contact

On page ‘Wordpress’ I would like to display:

Web Programming
> Wordpress
> > Themes
> > Plugins
> > Functions
> CubeCart
> Gallery
Templates
Portfolio
About
Contact

On page ‘Themes’ I would like to display:

Web Programming
> Wordpress
> > Themes
> > > CSS
> > > JavaScript
> > > PHP
> > Plugins
> > Functions
> CubeCart
> Gallery
Templates
Portfolio
About
Contact

The problem was that to display the pages like that, I really needed to know all ancestors of the current page. Now that this plugin classes those, I can do exactly what I wanted.

Xavisys» » plugin

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