Plugin Roadmaps for H1 2011

Posted by in WordPress > Plugins

This year, with two plugins in an actual active development state, the plan is to try something a little different. Previously, Breadcrumb NavXT was the “favored child” that always received preferential treatment. As a result, releases slipped for the other plugins, namely WP Lynx.

Rather than separate development cycles, both Breadcrumb NavXT and WP Lynx will have synchronized release cycles. They will be released in “Release Waves”; Breadcrumb NavXT will aim for Mondays, WP Lynx will aim for Friday of the same week. Note that this is only for major releases, bug fix releases will maintain their “as needed” time line.

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Making Sense of Obfuscated Code

Posted by in Enemy of the Spammers

It should be no surprise that some plugin authors can no be trusted. We’ve seen that with the BlogPress SEO plugin, but that one was just sloppy. Others actually try to hide what they are doing. An easy way of doing this is to use a PHP code obfuscating application. These will produce code such as:

<?php if(!function_exists("TC9A16C47DA8EEE87")){function TC9A16C47DA8EEE87(...

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Fun Fact: System Restore Won’t Make You a Sandwich

Posted by in General

Looks like Microsoft has some sense of humor:

It won’t make me a sandwich?

System Restore can fix many problems, but it’s not designed to do everything. It won’t fix a slow download speed, for example. But it’s a great tool to turn to when everything else you’ve tried hasn’t worked…

I ran across this little nugget last night while trying to figure out why System Restore was only keeping one restore point on my dad’s laptop.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Breadcrumb NavXT 3.7.0

Posted by in WordPress > Plugins

Holy networked sites batman! With Breadcrumb NavXT 3.7.0, you can now have a complete, multi site wide, breadcrumb trail. Also new to this release are custom post type root pages, these are similar to the posts page setting that WordPress has for posts. Other notable features include the ability to use posts as a taxonomy for custom posts, and a settings version checker alerting to incomplete installs.

This version has many under the hood enhancements and bug fixes in regards to saving, and importing settings, installation, detection of unsupported PHP versions, and some rare use cases for Breadcrumb NavXT. Many of the previous upgrade and installation issues have a good workaround in place.

Please note that the following translations have not been updated by their authors:

  • Russian
  • French
  • Spanish (update available in SVN trunk)
  • German
  • Indonesian

If you are fluent in any of these languages and wish to update these translations,  let me know. I am sure many users will be grateful.

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

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Make Teamspeak 3 Use Your QT libs

Posted by in Guides

After upgrading some core files this past week on my laptop, I noticed that Teamspeak 3 no longer would open. I have a desktop icon that calls the script that starts Teamspeak. When I opened up a terminal and tried to run the script, I recieved this error:

ts3client_linux_amd64: error while loading shared libraries: libpng12.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Well, I have libpng 1.4.3 on my laptop, and I’d prefer to not have multiple versions installed. Luckily, the cause of this issue is the QT4 library files that ship with Teamspeak 3. If you have KDE4, like I do, then all you have to do is move these QT files out of the Teamspeak 3 install directory. A quick way to do this is to use the following once you are in the directory where Teamspeak 3’s files are located:

mkdir backup
mv libQt* ./backup/

Now Teamspeak 3 will use your already installed system QT4 library files, and Teamspeak 3 should now work with modern versions of libpng.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]