Breadcrumb NavXT 2.0 Beta

The beta is coming soon, very soon. I have a mostly functional version of the breadcrumb class working on my testbed, and tomorrow night I’ll get to work on the administration interface and creating the template for the language files. Then I’ll go back to tidying up loose ends in the class, and release a beta sometime tomorrow evening. So far, just about everything has been rewritten, and all custom wpdb queries were removed. This may cause a slight performance hit, but it should not be that big, unless the pages are very large, and this solves compatibility issues with some other plug-ins, namely the Polyglot plug-in. A the new hierarchical category system has been implemented, and there is now support for multi-paged searches, archives, and home pages. When the beta is released I will need testers that are willing to help debug the plug-in, as well as translators who are willing to write language files for the new administration interface.

Right now I need testers for:

  • Testing PHP4 compatibility (Even though I don’t officially support PHP4 anymore, I do try to keep things working in it)
  • Testing on blogs with various setups for static front pages, including the built in WordPress methods. It seems that the older versions still had bugs in regards to particular implementations of this, and it looked like the old code had some hacks that attempted to get things to work for static front pages. It’s time to get this working properly.
  • General testing, making sure options work as expected, etc.

Once the beta is out I request all bug reports be made in the post that it is announced in, this will keep the Breadcrumb NavXT page’s comment stream cleaner for once the plug-in is officially released.

-John Havlik

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Breadcrumb Navigation XT 1.10.0

Now with 100% more tags. That’s right, WordPres 2.3 is right around the metaphorical corner, and in preparation Breadcrumb Navigation XT 1.10.0 is now safe for general consumption. Support for the Simple Tagging Plugin was dropped in favor of the WordPress 2.3 taxonomy scheme. Additional changes include some bug fixes with those combobox setting selectors in the administration interface and some code fix ups to use the WordPress API in a more consistent manner when dealing with taxonomy. Remember that this may cause PHP indigestion problems for WordPress 2.2 or earlier. The old version (1.9.x) will remain available for one month. However, version 1.9.x will no longer be supported one week after WordPress 2.3 is released.

-John Havlik

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Breadcrumb Navigation XT Bug Fix

Some users, while trying to use the new administration system for Breadcrumb Navigation XT, had problems with the breadcrumb displaying. These users happen to be running PHP4. Since both my development environment and my web server run versions of PHP5, it is not a simple task of maintaining full PHP4 compatibility. In order to regain PHP4 compatibility version 1.9.2 was released today with a fix which is both in bad style and potentially dangerous. I am seeking a more elegant solution but until then this will have to do. Beginning with Breadcrumb Navigation XT 2.0.0, the way the Administration interface is handled will change and will eliminate the current problem.

-John Havlik

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Breadcrumb Navigation XT Version 1.9.0

Holy GUIs, Batman! Yep, the new Breadcrumb Navigation XT administration panel/GUI is finished and distributed with the new version. Other than the administration panel, some tweaks were made involving the behavior for attachment posts (which are broken for certain permalink structures until WordPress 2.4), search pages, and date archive pages. Attachment posts are properly supported and recognized as an attachment of a post instead of a post in the ‘uncategorized’ category. Now in search pages, the search terms are output into the breadcrumb along with a customizable prefix and suffix replacing the single title of previous versions. Date archive pages when the year, month, and day are specified now allow three of the most common wording orders: big endian (ISO standard), middle endian (common in the US), and little endian (common in Europe).

The next major version 2.0.0 will contain major changes and support for WordPress 2.3. It will not be released until a WordPress 2.3 preview release has been released. 2.0.0 will nearly be rewritten from the ground up to address some performance concerns I have about the current code. These mainly pertain to unnecessary redundant branch statements that require some major work to fix. Until then, do grab Breadcrumb NavXT from its project page.

-John Havlik

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Developing WP Trainer

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

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