The rather unfriendly weather this weekend provided a rather good opportunity to begin coding WP Trainer. Contrary to previous thoughts, my previous experience with RSS has helped little in working with the XML parser in PHP. Thus, getting the Garmin output XML file into a nice array of objects in PHP took a bit of time, but now that part is done. Now comes the learning of the Google Maps API, which has excellent documentation and looks like it will be easy to do. After that I’ll need to select a graphing API. Mootools does not have graphing capabilities so using that is out besides AJAX and effects stuff. If anyone knows of a good, fast, and lightweight javascript/SVG API for doing all sorts of graphs let me know.
Expect a beta for WP Trainer sometime near the end of this month, with a preview available on this blog in the coming weeks. Corresponding to this release I will rework moo.wp and the available download will correspond to the featured description. At the time of release API documentation for moo.wp will be available for theme and plug-in writers. Features described in the API documentation are guaranteed to remain the same for three WordPress major releases (e.g., 2.0.0, 2.1.0, 2.2.0, etc.) and will remain available for at least one year.
Breadcrumb NavXT is starting to get hits, Micheal did get a forward link going which has spurred that traffic. All of the various WordPress plug-in sites need to be updated, which means I probably have some e-mails to write. Anyways other that WordPress 2.3 support for 1.9, which includes the new tagging system, some more advanced length limiting techniques will be available. These include maximum total breadcrumb length and options on where and what to trim.
One last thing, I do realize that Internet Explorer 6 (and maybe 7) messes up the header on this blog, the simple solution to this is to at least upgrade to IE7, and think about switching to Firefox. Opera users will see that the footer is messed up, I am working on this but it may not be resolved for a week or so. I can not test for KHTML based browsers (e.g., Konqueror and Safari) right now so their status is unknown, but assumed to work.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]