Deep Thoughts by Robert Felty

After more than a month of fixing bugs and adding features, I have decided it is time to release Postie 1.3.0, the wordpress plugin which adds many features to post to your blog via e-mail. 1.3 offers many new features over the 1.2 line of postie, including better attachment handling, better language and character set support, and easier configuration. Here is a list of the new features and bug fixes from 1.3.beta to 1.3.0.

• Features
  • Added mpeg4 to default list of videotypes
  • Added support for KOI8-R character set (cyrillic)
  • Added support for iso-8859-2 character set (eastern european)
  • Added option to include custom icons for attachments
  • Added option to send confirmation message to sender
  • Enhanced e-mails for unauthorized users
  • Added option to send unauthorized e-mail back to sender
  • Added option to only allow e-mails from a specified list of smtp

  servers

  • Added option to use shortcode for embedding videos (works with the

  videos plugin http://www.daburna.de/download/videos-plugin.zip

  • Better handling of comment authors (thanks to Petter for suggestion)
  • Simplified message options (now includes an advanced options section)
  • Added filter ability for post content
• Bug fixes
  • No longer including wp-config.php
  • If tmpdir is not writable, try a different tmpdir
  • More subject encoding fixes
  • Updated image templates, which were causing problems for cron
  • Fixed in text captions
  • Fixed SQL problems when updating options
  • Fixed name clashes with other plugins
  • Fixed custom image field

I want to thank the many users who were willing to test out new features and bug fixes by trying out the development version. in particular, I want to thank Kyle and Hab at Abilene Christian University for offering me financial support to develop some additional features for their use of postie for a course at their university. I think that other postie users will enjoy some of these new features as well.

A few weeks ago I noticed a very strange bug with all of my wordpress plugins in the newest version of wordpress (2.7). All of the plugins can be used as widgets. When I tried to add one of plugin widgets to the sidebar, it seemed to be okay, but when I clicked on “save changes”, it would disappear. I then later discovered that it was sort of added. If I checked “show unused widgets”, then I would see my widget in the list, and if I tried to add it from here, the changes would stick.

A couple weeks ago I spent several hours trying to figure out what had changed in the widget handling code from wp 2.6 to 2.7, and decided to start from a wordpress default widget – the text widget, and see if I could get it to work, and then gradually change it to my plugin. I made some pretty good progress, but at the end I could not figure it out. I knew that I needed several hours of solid work to unravel the mystery, and with the holidays and moving across the country, I didn’t find the time until today.

But today I finally figured it out, and it actually only took me about an hour. It turns out I needed to change 3 bytes (characters). I happen to like mixed case, so many of my variables and such in my code look like “collapsArch”, or “collapsLink”. It turns out that the widget id in wp 2.7 will not allow mixed case. Or rather, it will exhibit the strange behavior I have been seeing. So changing “collapsArch” to “collapsarch” in 3 places in the widget handling code fixed the problem.

I have released updates to all 4 plugins today, along with a new debugging option, which should make it easier to solve possible problems. When the debug option is selected, some debugging information gets written to the page in a hidden <pre> environment. This way you can see what is going on by viewing the source, but most visitors will not notice the fact that you are debugging.

I have been very busy lately, but I have been working on the collapsing archives update for awhile. I have incorporated new features from collapsing categories into it, while trying to keep all the old features. One thing I have learned is that it is difficult to write code with many options, especially when some of them interact.

Since I released the collapsing categories update a bit prematurely, I have dubbed this one 0.9.alpha, and I have not given it a stable tag yet. So you will not see that it needs updating when you look at your plugins. I do think it is fairly stable, and would be very appreciative if a few people tried it out.

You can download it from the official wordpress plugin repository.

I just released version 0.6.1. This update is mostly bug fixes introduced in 0.6. I apologize for all the bugs in 0.6. It was a major rewrite, and I expected bugs, but probably should have labeled it alpha. I want to especially thank Hans Klaus for doing quite a bit of testing in 0.6.1, including testing the formatting with several different themes. Here is the changelog for 0.6.1:

• Improved styling so that collapsing and expanding symbols use a fixed-width font, but category names do not
• When using the option to have category names trigger expansion, and not showing posts, categories with no subcategories now link to the category
• Added option to use images instead of html for collapse/expand characters
• +/- now uses UTF-8 encoding instead of html entities (may not work for pages not encoded in UTF-8

Please post any comments in the Collapsing categories page.

I have just a pretty major revision to collapsing categories, version 0.6.
It includes the following changes:

• Can have multiple instances of widgets, each with separate options
• No longer works as non-widget
• All options are stored in one database row
• Added more sorting options
• Added option to include or exclude certain categories
• Added option to expand certain categories by default
• Added option to have category names either link to category archive or to activate expanding and collapsing

I realized this morning that this new version requires WP 2.6+. I would like it to be compatible back to at least 2.5, if not 2.3. However, I can’t seem to get it to work. The problem seems to be in adding the widget. In 2.5- the widget appears and can be added, and options can be set. But when you click on “save changes”, the widget disappears from the list. I have tried replacing a 2.5 widgets.php file with a 2.6 one, and that worked. I have also checked the database, and the options are being updated. So it must be something to do with how the widgets get registered. I have spent several hours trying to figure it out, and need to get back to my day job. I would be very pleased if someone else figured it out. In the meantime, 0.5.10 will work with wordpress 2.3-2.6