mtekk's Crib
July 27th, 2010

So today I received an email stating that a plugin of mine is featured in a book about WordPress—I wonder which one it was. After doing a little research I confirmed that the book does, indeed cover Breadcrumb NavXT—the email wasn’t very specific as to which plugin they were talking about, and I almost passed it off as spam.

The book is “WordPress and Flash 10x Cookbook” by Peter Spannagle and Sarah Soward. As the title suggests it covers WordPress and integrating flash elements into it (Yes, I find it odd that Breadcrumb NavXT is in it, but whatever). The section covering Breadcrumb NavXT is in chapter 2, and does a decent job representing it. Though, personally I would have elaborated a little more on it. In particular, I would have been a little more specific in the installation instructions—the provided instructions could lead to a different plugin being installed.

Unfortunately, with the fast pace of software development, the book is sort of out of date (not as bad as a WordPress 2.8 Themes book released this month by the same publisher). Luckily, Breadcrumb NavXT has not changed enough for the instructions in the book to be invalid or misleading. If you are looking for a book on WordPress and Flash you may want to check it out. You can pick up a copy from the usual place (Amazon).

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

As part of my goals last week, I was working heavily on Breadcrumb NavXT’s custom post type support (after I finished up replacing my desktop’s motherboard with a more stable one). This work is ready for testing. So far, it has passed my development test cases and is ready for end user testing.

The implementation in the SVN trunk has one flaw. It doesn’t handle the “hierarchy flip” situation, where a post hierarchy can terminate with a post that is flat (e.g. it uses taxonomies to be located, not a post hierarchy). One standard example of this “hierarchy flip” is attachments to posts. They are hierarchical, but the parent post is not. Currently, this is handled using an “exception” for attachments. A proper solution would check and continue until it gets to the very top. However, this would impact performance, and is unnecessary for most sites (I need feedback on this, if it is an issue, I will provide support).

It looks like the 3.6 release will be moved up to late July, from August. I plan on having it ready for the translation team by July 14th. It looks like I’ll punt the multisite support extensions to the 3.7 release this fall.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

As of a few minutes ago, Breadcrumb NavXT has preliminary support of custom post types. Note that this support is very basic. It essentially sees hierarchical custom posts and pages as the same thing, and all other post types as posts. This will be refined further in the coming weeks, where each post type will have it’s own options, a la taxonomies.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

June 14th, 2010
wp-lynx-580x326

Ok, so I let the cat out of the bag yesterday (ha ha). Back on topic, WP Lynx is a project that I have been working on for a few months now, with the help of JD Hodges. It was his idea originally, and he came to me for to create the plugin (and thanks to him it’s now available to everyone).

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Tagged: 7 Comments
June 3rd, 2010

This is the first bug fix release for the 3.5 branch of Breadcrumb NavXT. Several bugs related to the settings page have been fixed. These include fixing the wiping of settings on activation, XML settings file import issue, and the issues with saving the archive by date and custom taxonomy settings. Finally, the maintainers of the German and French translations have submitted updated translations. If you experience any issues with Breadcrumb NavXT 3.5.1, please leave a comment to this post describing your issue.

You can grab the latest version of Breadcrumb NavXT from the Breadcrumb NavXT page.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Tagged: 2 Comments