March 28th, 2013

I’m Speaking at WordCamp Minneapolis

Posted by John Havlik in Announcements > WordPress

My presentation titled “The Power of Custom Types” was accepted into the “Intermediate” track for WordCamp Minneapolis 2013. This is based off of the presentation I gave twice at WordCamp NYC last year. Based on some feedback from organizers this presentation will take a slightly different path than its predecessor.

Yes, it is still on Custom Post Types. However, custom taxonomies and post (custom) meta will also be covered. Inspiring members of the audience to use WordPress’ custom types in their next project is the aim of the presentation. In the presentation I will be covering the basics of CPTs, taxonomies, and post meta, presenting a few cool tips and tricks, discussing when a CPT, taxonomy, or post meta use is appropriate, and showcasing some cool plugins that use a combination of CPTs, taxonomies and post meta. As always, there will be plenty of time for Q&A so bring your questions.

Psst. If you haven’t registered yet, register for WordCamp Minneapolis while you still can.

-John Havlik

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March 2nd, 2013

Fix Plex Placing Albums into “Various Artists”

Posted by John Havlik in Guides

Plex is a pretty nifty media server and app for deices such as Roku. However, with a large music library, it can do some goofy things. One of the most annoying is placing albums under the “artist” Various Artists (when they shouldn’t be there).

Case in point, two albums that I ripped from CD ended up in this category. The first was Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 3, and the second was Daft Punk’s Discovery. Neither of these should be under Various Artists. What was the problem? Plex’s media scanner picks up on the Artist ID3 tag. If for a given album there are two or more artists it will throw it in the Various Artists group. The easy solution is to use an ID3 tag editor (EasyTAG and Kid3 are two open source options) to clean up and homogenize the artist field for all tracks in the album.

-John Havlik

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February 13th, 2013

Breadcrumb NavXT 4.3.0

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

Holy incremental improvements Batman! Rather than one big new thing, this release has several tweaks that improve the overall plugin. Two new breadcrumb template tags were added, %ftitle% and %fhtitle%. These two tags are not affected by bcn_breadcrumb::trim() and are thus suitable for the title attribute in links when a max breadcrumb length is set. Support for the Theme Hook Alliance’s proposed tha_breadcrumb_navigation filter was added.

The Home and Main site titles were removed as they were redundant. While doing this, now the %title% and %htitle% tags return the “Site Title” for the home breadcrumb and “Network Name” for the mainsite breadcrumb. This should make multisite installs a little more manageable until the network admin is available.

As a security precaution, all settings that accept HTML now are passed through wp_kses. A reasonable set of accepted HTML tags were added, if you run into an issue where a tag or attribute you were using is being stripped, please report it in the comments section below.

Finally, several bugs were fixed. Loading of translated default settings now works again. And, some tweaks to the tabs in the settings page were made to improve the look and feel in WordPress 3.5.

The Translation Team:

[glot-translators=breadcrumb-navxt]

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]

February 9th, 2013

Breadcrumb NavXT 4.3 Coming Next Week

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

Due to a issue with the Weblogs.us servers, Breadcrumb NavXT 4.3 was not released two weeks ago like originally planned. While preparing to release last night, a issue with the translation site was discovered (had incomplete translation sets). Now that both of these issues have been resolved, the release of Breadcrumb NavXT 4.3 has been rescheduled for next week. If you are a translator, check the Breadcrumb NavXT Translation Project to make sure that your translation set is complete.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]