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 During the times of neglect, postie got sorely out of date.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.