Peter Westwood

Updating plugins for WordPress 2.5

westi — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:13:03 +0000

I have just released an updated version of my “Page Excerpt” plugin to work with the new add_meta_box() api in WordPress 2.5. Enjoy!

WordPress 2.5 Contributors

westi — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:53:30 +0000

In order to try and recognise the large number of contributors to WordPress 2.5 I have attempted to create a tag cloud using my powers of grep and sed and the wonderful tool that is tagcrowd.com

WordPress 2.5

westi — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:42:20 +0000

WordPress 2.5 has been released. Now is the right time to upgrade and give thanks to allow those people that brought it to you. You can read more about it here.

Giving WP Contact Form some love

westi — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:51:08 +0000

As a user of Ryan Duff’s WP-ContactForm plugin for a long time I thought I would see if I could get it updated to work better with more recent versions of WordPress. The trunk version on dev.wp-plugins.org had not been updated in over a year and there were many reports of it causing problems with the new media library in WordPress 2.5 over on the wp-testers list. After talking with Ryan via email he agreed to let me take over development of the plugin and I pushed out a small update last night which fixed the issues I knew about in the trunk version. I hope to get the plugin updated some more over the coming weeks to take advantage of some of the other features in WordPress like nonces and the shortcodes available in WordPress 2.5.

Debugging ajax problems with firebug.

westi — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:29:58 +0000

Now WordPress 2.5 RC1 is out it the wild for testing we are receiving some reports of strange problems with some of the ajax functionality in the admin pages so I have prepared a quick tutorial to help people collect the relevant debugging information to help us investigate the problems.

Here is how to prepare:

Install Firefox (if you don’t have it already!)
Install firebug. This is the web debugging tool of choice.
Load up the relevant WordPress admin page that is not working for you.

Now to collect the information. First load up firebug for the current page by clicking on the icon in the status bar or using the Tools menu to select “Tools>Firebug>Open Firebug”.

Next you need to fill in the form that is causing you problems:

Now you can click on the form submission button and see the activity in the firebug console:

Next you can switch between the tabs to display the other information:

You can then copy this data out of the firebug windows by right clicking and selecting the appropriate copy option.

This information can then be provided either via the wp-testers mailing list or in the trac ticket you have created for your issue.

living on the edge

westi — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:31:26 +0000

WordPress 2.5 is nearing release so I have updated this site to the latest trunk code to try and catch any issues - apologies if the site goes a wonky at times.

WordPress 2.3.3

westi — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:15:00 +0000

WordPress 2.3.3 was released recently so if you haven’t updated yet take this as a friendly reminder as it includes a security fix. You can read a more detailed look at the changes over on my other blog.

Last.fm vs Pandora and the age of “ad supported” online radio in the uk

westi — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:38:34 +0000

I am an avid fan of last.fm, the uk based social music platform and was please to see today the announcement of new functionality within the last.fm website to allow the playing of full-length tracks and albums for free. This new reminded me of the announcement a couple of weeks ago from Pandora that LABELS AND PUBLISHERS FORCE BLOCKING OF PANDORA IN THE UK (there empasis not mine!).

How can one company achieve it but the other say it’s not possible I wonder?

Query Child Of $Page - update to make it work for anyone apart from me!

westi — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:04:35 +0000

It seems that back in Oct 2006 when I updated my site design to use a simple plugin to automate the page listing all my plugins I managed to zip up a non-working version of the code. Thanks to Stephen Rider my incompetence has been discover and I have now released an updated version of the plugin which will actually work for other people! If you have attempted in the past to use my query child of $page plugin and failed please head over to the page and download a working copy.

The Enchanted Garden

westi — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 19:58:32 +0000

Yesterday we went to visit The Enchanted Garden at Sheffield Park and I took a few nice photos:

WordPress 2.3.2

westi — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 08:15:22 +0000

WordPress 2.3.2 has hit the streets as a late christmas early new years present for you all it include a security fix. You can read a more detailed look at the changes over on my other blog.

Tracking deprecated functions

westi — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:25:40 +0000

This evening I have added some changes for the upcoming WordPress v2.4 release which will help theme, plugin and site developers track down when they are using deprecated WordPress functions. This new functionality relies, in part, on the new WP_DEBUG flag being enabled before anything interesting happens. With the new flag enabled a USER_NOTICE php error will be raised for each call to a deprecated function and if a deprecated file is included by a plugin. The error messages include the replacement function name and the version in which the function was deprecated.

The changes also introduce a pair of new hooks, deprecated_function_run and deprecated_file_included, which could be used by a plugin to create a log of all the functions used and provide the developer with information of what files need updating to use the replacement functions. These new hooks will fire whenever a deprecated function/file is used even if WP_DEBUG is disabled to allow for a simple plugin to log the errors without triggering the actual error on a live site.

Props to docwhat and darkdragon/santosj for their work on this change.

ballpit

westi — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 10:13:03 +0000

These are too cool. I want one too!

eclipse pdt rocks!

westi — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:58:28 +0000

Eclipse PDT rocks. My WordPress development environment now has a debugger!

WordPress 2.3.1

westi — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 21:11:55 +0000

WordPress 2.3.1 has hit the streets including one security fix. You can read a more detailed look at the changes over on my other blog.