September 12th, 2014

An Update on WP Lynx 1.0.0

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

This has taken much longer than originally expected, but a new version of WP Lynx is finally nearing completion. All of the issues for the 1.0.0 milestone have been closed, and the SVN trunk has been updated with a preview release. The release of WP Lynx 1.0.0 is slated for the end next week. Much of the plugin has been rewritten and reorganized for this release. The largest user facing change is a major update to the Lynx Print adding interface. See below for a screenshot of the new Lynx Print interface.

The new Lynx Pring Adding Screen

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

August 1st, 2014

Breadcrumb NavXT Premium Extensions Are Now Available

Posted by John Havlik in Announcements

Foretold in a previous post, almost a year ago, premium extensions for Breadcrumb NavXT are in development. Today, the first three premium extensions are now available for purchase. These are: Breadcrumb NavXT Menu Magic, Breadcrumb NavXT Title Trixx, and Breadcrumb NavXT WPML Extensions. Visit the Breadcrumb NavXT Extensions Store to see all of the officially supported Breadcrumb NavXT extension plugins.

Breadcrumb NavXT Menu Magic

Breadcrumb NavXT Menu Magic allows the site administrator to select a WordPress Menu for Breadcrumb NavXT to follow for both titles and hierarchy for resources (posts, taxonomy terms, archives, etc). If the current item is not found in the menu, Breadcrumb NavXT will fall back to its default behavior.

Features

Define breadcrumb trail hierarchy using a WordPress menu.
Set alternate titles for breadcrumbs using a WordPress menu.
Insert custom breadcrumbs into the breadcrumb trail using link elements within a WordPress menu.

Breadcrumb NavXT Title Trixx

Breadcrumb NavXT Title Trixx allows a custom title to be set for any post’s (as in any post type) breadcrumb. It features integration with All in One SEO Pack and WordPress SEO by Yoast. If none of the supported SEO plugins are activated on the current WordPress install, an “Alternate Title” meta box will be available on all post edit screens.

Features

Supports replacing the breadcrumb title with All in One SEO Pack’s “SEO Title”
Supports replacing the breadcrumb title WordPress SEO by Yoast’s “Breadcrumbs Title”
Includes “Alternate Title” meta box for replacing the title if none of the supported SEO plugins are active

Breadcrumb NavXT WPML Extensions

Breadcrumb NavXT WMPL Extensions improves Breadcrumb NavXT’s support for WPML Multilingual CMS. While Breadcrumb NavXT mostly works with WMPL Multilingual CMS, there are some deficiencies; see Breadcrumb NavXT and WPML Compatibility. With Breadcrumb NavXT WPML Extensions, string based settings within Breadcrumb NavXT and Custom Post Type root pages are translatable within WPML Multilingual CMS.

Features

Automatically links to the correct Custom Post Type “root page” for the current language
Makes Breadcrumb NavXT settings that are strings available for translation via WPML String Translation
Improves Breadcrumb NavXT widget’s WPML compatibility

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

July 29th, 2014

Breadcrumb NavXT 5.1.1

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

This is the first bug fix release of the 5.1 branch of Breadcrumb NavXT. 5.1.0 introduced a bug in the behavior of attachments, where the attachment and parent would have the same link. This has been fixed in 5.1.1. Additionally, the check for WP_Post in bcn_breadcrumb_trail::do_post() has been reduced from a fatal PHP error to a _doing_it_wrong() call producing useful information for developers.

Additionally, two bugs that affect versions other than just 5.1.0 were fixed. Breadcrumb NavXT will no longer cause PHP to throw errors or warnings on author archive pages for authors with zero published posts. The author archive code was modernized and made much more robust than that in 5.1.0 and earlier. Lastly, the parameters for the included widget’s (pre) text filter were changed to match the default WordPress text widget’s text filter parameters.

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]

June 9th, 2014

Breadcrumb NavXT 5.1.0

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

Holy squashed bugs Batman! Breadcrumb NavXT 5.1.0 features 13 bug fixes and one new feature. Several small tweaks were made to the settings page to improve the overall experience, including handling HTML5 form validation errors in a more intuitive manner. The settings importer should work once again in this release. Previously, there was a bug where it read the version string incorrectly, causing the settings to never be imported. ‘typeof’ was added to the list of valid HTML tag attributes for all accepted HTML tags in the breadcrumb templates.

Internally, fixes were made to the bcn_breadcrumb_trail::do_author() and bcn_breadcrumb_trail::do_root() functions. Additionally, the bcn_breadcrumb_template filter should be available again, it was left out as a regression in the 5.0 release. Lastly, two edge cases were fixed in the custom post type default settings generation code.

Changes to bcn_breadcrumb_trail::do_post()

If you are using the Breadcrumb NavXT Multidimension Extensions plugin, please update it to version 1.7.1 or later. If you have written an extension plugin to Breadcrumb NavXT please take note. As of Breadcrumb NavXT 5.1, bcn_breadcrumb_trail::do_post() expects to have a valid WP_Post object passed into it. Any plugins extending this function will need to be compatible, otherwise PHP will throw warnings.

Changes to breadcrumb_navxt and mtekk_adminKit classes

breadcrumb_navxt now stores it’s version as a constant (makes it easier to read without instantiating the class). Likewise, mtekk_adminKit‘s internal version is now a const. Lastly, a new filter, bcn_opts_update_prebk was added. This filter is run by the bcn_admin::opts_update_prebk function, it filters the options array just before being backed up during a settings save.

RDFa Breadcrumbs

New in 5.1.0 is RDFa Breadcrumbs support. All new installs will, by default, have settings configured to support RDFa Breadcrumbs. Since this primarily affects the breadcrumb templates, those upgrading from older versions can either manually add in the RDFa markup to their breadcrumb templates. Or, you can do a settings reset (via the help menu on the Breadcrumb NavXT settings page) to get a fresh set of settings that are the same as if you installed Breadcrumb NavXT for the first time.

Widget Features and Fixes

There were two bug fixes and one new feature for the included widget in this release. The new feature is support for RDFa Breadcrumbs, which has replaced Schema.org Beadcrumbs support (since none of the search providers actually use Schema.org Breadcrumbs support was dropped for now). On the bug fix front, a case where the widget could throw PHP warnings on the frontend was fixed. Lastly, the widget title and the text shown before the breadcrumb trail are now passed through filters (widget_title and widget_text) to aid translation plugins such as WPML.

The Translation Team:

[glot-translators=breadcrumb-navxt]

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

February 8th, 2014

WPMark Twenty Twelve

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress

WPMark consists of two components: a WordPress plugin and a JMeter test plan. The WordPress plugin populates an empty install with the requisite demo content, sets up the requisite options, and generates cached copies of portions of the site for testing.