As of tonight, the Breadcrumb NavXT SVN Trunk is in a feature freeze. All of the features I wanted to include in 3.6.0 have been implemented and it is now time to debug and perform regression testing. By Friday, Breadcrumb NavXT 3.6.0 will be released to the translators. This places the release around the 23rd of August. Features that need extensive testing are:

• Custom post type support (hierarchical post types in particular)
• Custom taxonomy type support in conjunction with custom post types
• The new “Undo” function

The first two have been implemented for a while now, the last one is new as of the last two nights. Rather than prompt to confirm the user really wants to reset the options or import options from a file, Breadcrumb NavXT now allows the user to undo their last settings changes. This uses another entry in the wp_options table, which is not set to autoload (the version entry is now set to not autoload as well) so it does not impact site performance in any significant way. Since much of the undo functionality is in the mtekk_admin class, these changes will make their way into the next WP Lynx as well.

Things that did make 3.6.0 are:

• Full support of multi-blog WordPress setups
• Auto integration with popular theme frameworks
• Slight tweaks to the options export/import format

These are planned for 3.7.0, which will be the first Breadcrumb NavXT version to require WordPress 3.0. Look for 3.7.0 in the mid to late November time frame. This is pushed back a little from the previous road map, but it allows me to pursue other cool projects (more on these later).

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

This is a minor improvement to the previous release of WP Lynx. It fixes a few issues reported by users. These include fixing an issue involving non UTF-8 encoded sites, and a fix for users on hosts with php safemode enabled. Finally, error reporting is improved slightly. As always, if you thing you found a bug please report it.

The next planned release, 0.2.0, will have some cool new features. Additionally, the settings page will be reorganized a little to make it easier to use. More on this as development progresses.

-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]