October 4th, 2013

Changes to Note Before Upgrading to Breadcrumb NavXT 5.0

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

Breadcrumb NavXT 5.0 is very close to being ready for release. Unlike a typical release, quite a bit has changed under the hood this time, hence the bump up from 4.4 to 5.0. Development for 5.0 focused heavily on making Breadcrumb NavXT easier to extend. In doing so, it had to part ways with how some things were done in the past. The following changes are the most likely to affect current Breadcrumb NavXT installs.

Move to PHP5 Object Model

This release features a move to PHP5’s Object Model, including changing the default constructor from the class name (C++ style) to __construct(). All member functions and variables are now explicitly scoped as either private, protected or public. Additionally, some member functions have been explicitly made static (to allow static calling without causing strict warnings in PHP5.4).

Organizational Changes

Several internal changes were made to reorganize the plugin. One change that will affect third party code is the move from bcn_breadcrumb_trail::trail to bcn_breadcrumb_trail::breadcrumbs. For 5.0, bcn_breadcrumb_trail::trail will exist as pointer to the same data held in bcn_breadcrumb_trail::breadcrumbs. In the future bcn_breadcrumb_trail::trail will be removed and it is recommended that existing extension plugins to Breadcrumb NavXT be updated to reflect this internal change.

WordPress Multisite Changes

Support for multisite WordPress installs has changed quite a bit in 5.0. To support the new Network Admin settings page introduced in this version, the way settings are handled in multisite installs has changed. By default the settings set in the ‘Network Admin’ settings page will take priority over individual site preferences. This is different from the pre-5.0 behavior. If you have a multisite install, please read Controlling Breadcrumb NavXT Settings From the Network Settings Page.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

June 21st, 2013

Breadcrumb NavXT 4.4.0

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

Holy API improvements Batman! As with 4.3.0, this release contains several smaller improvements rather than a single, or handful of ‘block buster’ new features. The largest set of these improvements is the addition, and improvement of several filters within Breadcrumb NavXT.

Of the new filters, bcn_template_tags has one of the larger impacts. It allows the addition of custom breadcrumb template tags. Other new filters include bcn_allowed_html, bcn_breadcrumb_template, and bcn_breadcrumb_url. For more information on these filters, please checkout the Breadcrumb NavXT Filters section of the documentation.

Additionally, the set of valid HTML for breadcrumb templates was revised and expanded. The basic set should now include a, img, span, h1, and h2 HTML tags. Added valid properties include:

aria-hidden
data-icon
itemprop
itemscope
itemtype

With the bcn_allowed_html filter the list of valid HTML tags and associated properties can be expanded upon without modification of the plugin.

The Translation Team:

[glot-translators=breadcrumb-navxt]

As always, you can grab the latest version of Breadcrumb NavXT from the Breadcrumb NavXT page. If you experience any issues with this version of Breadcrumb NavXT, please leave a comment on this post detailing the issue.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

May 4th, 2013

Monitor Logins 0.2.0

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

Introducing Monitor Logins, a simple plugin that allows you to monitor login attempts (successful and unsuccessful) made against your user account on your WordPress install. Failed attempts to login to user accounts cause email notices to be sent to that user. That is, if they have notifications enabled. Notifications are enabled on a per user basis, and are off by default.

Additionally, Monitor Logins will remember devices used to login with, should a device be “new” upon successful login a notice will be sent to the user. Devices are forgotten if they have not been seen for a few months. The last several successful logins are remembered and displayed in a list akin to what Gmail does. Only a user can view his/her own login activity.

I originally wrote this plugin to gain greater visibility into login attempts made against user accounts on this site almost a year ago (Way before the recent botnet dictionary attacks). Since then, it has been steadily refined to make it more suitable for a wider range of users. For those of you who attend the MSP WordPress meetups, this is the plugin I demoed during a lightning talk session in March.

More information is available on the Monitor Logins project page.

Download Monitor Logins 0.2.0 from Git Hub.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

April 20th, 2013

WP Lynx 0.6.0

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

Say hello to a new, better organized, settings page. Settings are now organized by context, with many of the advanced, infrequently used settings sitting under the advanced tab. In the process of updating the settings page, the underlying plugin core was updated to the latest mtekk_adminKit, which already ships with Breadcrumb NavXT.

Additionally, WP Lynx now supports capturing a screenshot of a website and using that as the thumbnail image. This is provided though Snapito!, you’ll need to grab an API key for it to work. Note that the site screenshot will always be the second image in a thumbnail set, unless no other thumbnails were found. Also note that the initial loading of a screenshot may take several seconds. Please wait for the screenshot to load in the window before inserting the lynx print to ensure WP Lynx can cache the image properly.

Lastly, a few tweaks were made to the scraping engine to fix the causes of PHP notices in cases where something went wrong in retrieving a site.

Note that this release is the first in a series of planned releases between now and 1.0. Each will add a minor number of features, tracked in the WP Lynx GitHub Repository.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

February 13th, 2013

Breadcrumb NavXT 4.3.0

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

Holy incremental improvements Batman! Rather than one big new thing, this release has several tweaks that improve the overall plugin. Two new breadcrumb template tags were added, %ftitle% and %fhtitle%. These two tags are not affected by bcn_breadcrumb::trim() and are thus suitable for the title attribute in links when a max breadcrumb length is set. Support for the Theme Hook Alliance’s proposed tha_breadcrumb_navigation filter was added.

The Home and Main site titles were removed as they were redundant. While doing this, now the %title% and %htitle% tags return the “Site Title” for the home breadcrumb and “Network Name” for the mainsite breadcrumb. This should make multisite installs a little more manageable until the network admin is available.

As a security precaution, all settings that accept HTML now are passed through wp_kses. A reasonable set of accepted HTML tags were added, if you run into an issue where a tag or attribute you were using is being stripped, please report it in the comments section below.

Finally, several bugs were fixed. Loading of translated default settings now works again. And, some tweaks to the tabs in the settings page were made to improve the look and feel in WordPress 3.5.

The Translation Team:

[glot-translators=breadcrumb-navxt]

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]