Deep Thoughts by Robert Felty

I recently released my sixth wordpress plugin – category reminder. I have seen several requests around for a plugin which forces users to select a category for each post they publish, so that the posts don’t just end up as uncategorized. Bloggers with multiple authors seem especially interested in this. I have wanted this requirement for myself as well, since I sometimes forget to categorize a post before publishing it. Now users can easily add this functionality via this plugin.

As I mentioned a few months back, wordpress 2.8 has a completely new widget API, which means that I had to do quite a bit of work to get my widgetized plugins ready for 2.8. Fortunately, the new API is much better than the old style. I won’t guarantee that they are without bugs, which is why I am calling them beta. But they should all work with the defaults at any rate. They also have some new features, including several default style templates, which should make styling easier for most users. And for people who don’t like widgets, now you can enter all the options into your template manually, meaning you can use different options in different parts of your theme if you wish.

Also I will be on vacation for a few days, so I won’t be answering questions in the forum until Monday the 15th.

Thanks to all the users who helped me test out the 1.3.testing version of postie, the wordpress plugin which allows you to post by e-mail. I now feel that it is stable enough to call it 1.3.alpha. There are probably still some bugs, but I think that the new features probably warrant giving it a try for most users. Here is a summary of the new features and fixes:

• Now using default wordpress image and upload handling, which means:
  • No more creating special directories for postie
  • No more confusion about imagemagick
  • Can now use the gallery feature of wordpress
  • Attachments are now connected to posts in the database
  • All image resizing uses wordpress’s default settings (under media)
• Configuration, settings and documentation improvements
  • Completely redesigned settings page (mostly thanks to Rainman)
  • Reset configuration no longer deletes mailserver settings
  • Now including help files and faq directly in settings page
• More media features
  • Automatically turn links to youtube into an embedded player
  • Added option to embed audio files with custom templates
  • Video options are now template based
  • Image options are now solely template based, with several new default
    templates
• Bug fixes
  • Uploading images from vodafone phones should now work
  • Correctly handling Windows-1252 encoding
  • Correctly handling non-ascii characters in subject line

I still need your help! As I mentioned there are bound to be some bugs, and I would appreciate if you give me feedback in the postie forum. Several people have also provided localizations. That is a big help. Some of the current localizations now need some updating. If you are familiar with that, I would be grateful. A .pot file is included with the postie distribution.

I have mostly stopped development on the 1.2 branch of postie. I will be adding new updates to postie in the development version.

Below is a screenshot of the new options page for postie.

I would like to announce 2 new versions of my popular postie plugin for wordpress, which gives users advanced options for posting to their blog via e- mail.

The first new version is 1.2.2, which has some minor bug fixes and improvements over 1.2.1. I will continue to release several more 1.2 releases over the coming weeks with bug fixes.

The second new version is 1.3.testing, which is, as the name implies, under testing. The main new feature for the 1.3 line will be the use of wordpress’s built-in attachment uploading, and image handling. This may sound trivial at first, but it actually makes a big difference. Postie has been around since 2004. Over the last 5 years, wordpress has changed dramatically. Postie has gone through several different active maintainers, and several periods of neglect. During the times of neglect, postie got sorely out of date. I am working on bringing it back up to par with wordpress.

For example, WordPress 2.5 introduced the gallery feature, which makes it very simply to make a nice thumbnail gallery of images in a post simply by using the shortcode . However, this depends on having a link between attachments and the post. Postie currently does not do this. In fact, postie <=1.2 uses its own custom upload directories, instead of the default wordpress directories. This makes postie more difficult to install and configure, and confusing to many users. Starting with 1.3.testing, this is no longer the case. Now postie uploads files into the default wordpress uploads directory (or whatever custom directory you have specified), and it links attachments to the post, which means you can use the gallery feature.

Postie used to have a bunch of different options for image handling, and did the image handling all itself, using either GD or imagemagick. Many users got confused by the imagemagick option. Starting with 1.3.testing, postie now lets wordpress handle resizing images — the same way it does when you would use the web-based post editor. This should simplify options dramatically, and hopefully cause much less confusion.

Also in the works, though not fully documented yet, will be the ability for postie to check multiple inboxes. This could be handy if for example, you have a multi-author blog, and you want some people’s posts to automatically be posted, while others be posted in draft form, and require approval.

I very much appreciate all the feedback I get from postie users in the postie forum, including feature requests, bug reports, praise and donations. I hope that the adventurous amongst you will take the time to download 1.3.testing and let me know what you think. As it is a testing version, I will be updating it on a fairly regular basis. Once I get some feedback from users, I will release an alpha version, and then a stable version in the next month or two.

Finally, I should mention that I posted this via postie, as well as this cooking post which shows off the gallery feature of wordpress.

I’ve been working a lot lately on some major rewrites to all 4 of the collapsing X wordpress plugins I have written. All 4 of them now have the following features:

1. All use the same javascript file, which will only get loaded once, in case you use more than 1 of the plugins
2. No longer use external css files. Instead, the css styling is set through an option, which should be easier to configure, and also reduces http requests, speeding page load time
3. The inline javascript portions have been moved to the footer, to improve load time
4. Default options are now added to the database upon installation, which solves a problem that existed when trying to use them manually

In addition, Collapsing Links and Collapsing Pages can now be used as either a widget or manually.

All of these updates are available in the development version of each of the respective download locations on the wordpress plugin repository. I am leaving them in the development version for a little while, in the hopes that some users will test them out, and I can fix some bugs before releasing them as a new version.

There is one caveat: I have been doing some testing with WP 2.7beta, and after many hours of frustration today, I never did figure out why the widgets were not showing up after adding them to the sidebar and saving. I did discover though, that if you select “show unused widgets”, then add them, that they get added just fine. If anyone has any hint on why this would be the case, and how to get them to work completely right under 2.7, I would be very happy indeed.