It time for the third service release for Breadcrumb NavXT 2.1. This is the second to last planed release for the 2.1 branch, heavy development for 2.2 begins this weekend. There are some fixes with bugs in the core breadcrumb class, especially relating to having a post as a member of both a parent category and one of its children. Some administrative interface cleanup has taken place, and the German translation was resynchronized with the administrative interface. Yesterday was the intended release date however a wait for the German translation to finish synchronizing took place, it is not fully up to date, but by the end of the week the distribution will have it fully updated.

New features to look for in 2.2 include fully customizable anchor structures (yes, that means you can use the rel=”” element for those who want nofollows (I’d advise against using nofollows, but that does not mean we’ll stop you)). Breadcrumb trails will no longer require to contain linked elements (for if you want to have them in your HTML title). Plus a bunch of other things. Begining today the Development build from SVN is considered unstable and possibly broken.

You can grab the latest Breadcrumb NavXT from the Breadcrumb NavXT page.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Maintenance release 3 for the 2.1 series is almost ready, some final fixes and checks are being made. Tom, once again had some significant input on this version. The administrative interface was tweaked a little, plus some fixes were made to the core class. There is a new look for the administrative interface, but its introduction may wait until 2.2 (the code for it will be there, just one line will be commented out to prevent it from running, adventurous users can uncomment that line if they wish). Speaking of which, 2.2 is going to have significant changes, some of which have already been set in motion.

The “API” for Breadcrumb NavXT is changing in 2.2, the existing functions for backward compatibility will not exist in 2.2. Additionally, in 2.2 some redundant options will be removed. This is for better integration into WordPress. Internally, many things will be changing for 2.2 as more of an object oriented approach in implemented. Realistically speaking, this is just a natural evolution of the breadcrumb class, which was set in motion back in 2.0.

In August of this year PHP4 will reach its end of life. Even though WordPress may continue to support PHP4, we will not. Most webhosts have PHP5 available for their customers, if PHP5 is not enabled on your site yet ask your webhost how to enable it. After August 8, 2008 the official solution to any problem experience in a PHP4 environment is to switch to PHP5 and retest. This may sound arrogant, but it is time for PHP4 to go the way of PHP3 and the dodo.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

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]