June 10th, 2008

(A Better) WordPress Shopping Cart

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

The folks over at Instinct Entertainment released WP e-Commerce 3.6.6 today and received not so great feedback from users. Looks like 3.6.6 is a bit buggy. Sadly, this does not surprise me one bit. Take a look at the code, and try to grasp what is going on.

A year ago I muddled around, and hacked an older version of it (was the newest version at the time) apart for a client of mine. At the time the code was a nightmare to navigate. This spring when they wanted to add more features, some of which were in the newer 3.6 branch, I did some research on the changes between versions. Sadly, things have not gotten better (code organization wise).

Right now, WP e-Commerce is not open source. It however, is the only solution for users that want to use Authorize.net. The client that I made the modifications to WP e-Commerce for at one point proposed just making our own plug-in. Since I personally do not have an interest in establishing a e-commerce site, I will not spontaneously produce a e-commerce plug-in.

Should such a competing plug-in be released by me a few things can be guaranteed about it.

Fully commented source, just about every line will have an explanation, functions commented properly, with explanations of their prototypes.
Full (and proper) i18n (internationalization) support in accordance with the WordPress i18n guidelines.
Utilizes the WordPress API when appropriate.
Clean, fast code that is object oriented when appropriate.
Highly modular, easy to remove unwanted/unneeded features. Items included in the HTML head are reduced to only what is needed.
Predictable release time line similar to that of Breadcrumb NavXT and WordPress. Monthly bug fix releases, new features released the same month as a WordPress “major release” (e.g. 2.2, 2.3, 2.5 were major releases), or every three to four months (I try to keep bug fix releases fixed to three or four max).
100% Open Source licensed under the GNU GPL2.

Numbers 1,2,3,6 and 7 would be there from the get-go. The fifth one would be introduced in time, and the fourth would be an ongoing thing. Development would begin as .1 and not follow any particular time line for releases until 1.0 is reached. By 1.0 it would be stable, though by .8 or so it’d be a suitable replacement to WP e-Commerce.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

May 31st, 2008

Mtekk’s Testimonials 1.0.0

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

After over a year sitting idle, Mtekk’s Testimonials is now available for public consumption. This initial public release brings a ton of fixes to the old testimonials plug-in originally written for the Weblogs.us front page (more on that later). Mtekk’s Testimonials is a modern WordPress plug-in, which requires WordPress 2.5 to function. Naturally, it has full i18n support (POT file coming soon). It sports Short Code tags for displaying testimonials on any WordPress post or page. When located on a front page, AJAX support is available (this limitation is changing in 1.1), which automatically changes to the next testimonial in 10 seconds (can be disabled by modifying the testimonials.js file).

User submission of testimonials is possible, and can be disabled. These submissions are never automatically approved for showing up in the testimonial stream. Along with this, the domain and TLD can be restricted for user testimonial submissions as a anti-spam measure (to be honest right now it is compulsory, this is changing in 1.1).

You can see it in action at beta.weblogs.us and download it from it’s project page.

Next up on the update block is Iframe-B-Gone. Iframe-B-Gone is getting a full overhaul for it’s 1.1 release, the ETA for right now is by mid June. Then Breadcrumb NavXT’s June bugfix release, this will include some i18n related fixes as well as better handling of some “unique” category structures. WP Trainer is on hold until MooTools 1.2 is released.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

May 21st, 2008

Breadcrumb NavXT 2.1.2

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

The second maintenance release for the 2.1 series, and this month’s release brings some useful bug fixes. Static front page support has been improved (serious testing of it’s functionality took place in the past month.). This includes automagical detection of static front pages, which will do all the heavy lifting for you. Paged items now work as they did in 2.0. Do note that paged item support is not complete (that’s getting thrown into the July 2.2.0 release). Additionally, the behavior of the link current item option has changed, now instead of trying to actually generate a link the href is left blank. This seems to be the best way to link to the current page, as it is the simplest method for implementation and is guarenteed to work 100% of the time. Of course, that may change again in the future.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

May 7th, 2008

Some Fixes

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

When static front pages were reimplemented in Breadcrumb NavXT 2.1, it seems some things slipped through the cracks. In particular there is a problem with the frontpage breadcrumb, when on the frontpage. This and the options for static front pages were never cleaned up (my bad, I know). Another, relating to a /blog/blog and // error in the hyperlink for some by date archives was reported. Both of these will be fixed in this month’s service release, 2.1.2. For 2.2 support for WPMU will be improved (the administrative interface has problems with it right now), along with a widget. That release is a few months out still.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

April 10th, 2008

Next Breadcrumb NavXT

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

A week and a day a go Breadcrumb NavXT 2.1 was released. So far only one new bug has appeared. This happens for users of PHP4, and an upcoming bug fix release, 2.1.1 will contain a fix for that. What’s in store for Breadcrumb NavXT 2.2? Officially, there is one big thing that should be implemented in it. That is support for paged pages/posts/archives/searches/etc. Currently, basic framework exists for supporting these pages, and even an option to enable rudimentary support which was added in 2.0. Full support for these page types needs to be implemented, which is the last “unconquered” frontier. A widget plug-in will also make it to 2.2. I’m setting the intended release of 2.2 to be sometime this summer, think around July. In 2.2 there will be some additional changes to the core plug-in as things are better organized and modularized within it.

The reason for placing the release of 2.2 in July is so that it allows some time for additional bugs to be caught and fixed along with allowing time to complete the documentation. If everything goes as planned, the documentation for Breadcrumb NavXT will be fully written some time in June (possibly sooner). Until then, there is always Berry to work on, which will be released at the end of this month. Additionally, WP Trainer may actually rear it’s head if time permits.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]