Breadcrumb NavXT is in a Book

Posted by in WordPress

So today I received an email stating that a plugin of mine is featured in a book about WordPress—I wonder which one it was. After doing a little research I confirmed that the book does, indeed cover Breadcrumb NavXT—the email wasn’t very specific as to which plugin they were talking about, and I almost passed it off as spam.

The book is “WordPress and Flash 10x Cookbook” by Peter Spannagle and Sarah Soward. As the title suggests it covers WordPress and integrating flash elements into it (Yes, I find it odd that Breadcrumb NavXT is in it, but whatever). The section covering Breadcrumb NavXT is in chapter 2, and does a decent job representing it. Though, personally I would have elaborated a little more on it. In particular, I would have been a little more specific in the installation instructions—the provided instructions could lead to a different plugin being installed.

Unfortunately, with the fast pace of software development, the book is sort of out of date (not as bad as a WordPress 2.8 Themes book released this month by the same publisher). Luckily, Breadcrumb NavXT has not changed enough for the instructions in the book to be invalid or misleading. If you are looking for a book on WordPress and Flash you may want to check it out. You can pick up a copy from the usual place (Amazon).

-John Havlik

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Using Harmony Remotes With Intel CIR Recievers

Posted by in Guides

It’s really simple. So simple that I felt like an idiot when I did not get it to work right away. If you have a motherboard from Intel’s Extreme or Media series, you probably have CIR headers (some other manufactures have them as well, but it’s rather hit or miss). CIR is an acronym for Consumer InfraRed, is a standard of sorts that allows us to do fun things like turn on our HTPC with a standard IR remote. Best of all (sort of), it doesn’t require a USB adapter.

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Battlefield Heroes Server Admin in Linux

Posted by in Guides

Yes, you can run BFHCC.exe in Linux under wine. You just need to use some of the Microsoft libraries (OLE32 is just one of many that are needed). If invoked from the same directory as BFHCC.exe resides, it will load your settings just fine. However, it won’t let you warn, kick, or ban players (the pop up menu when right clicking on a player name does not work). Additionally, it runs kinda slow (I am running a 64bit kernel with a 32bit Wine install for compatibility reasons).

The other, somewhat more powerful, Battlefield Heroes server manager, Ness Manager, works perfectly in Linux. Best of all it doesn’t need Wine to run. This is thanks to it being completely written in Java. Naturally, you need a Java run time environment (JRE) installed for this to work. To install it you may need Wine (it’s a .exe installer), but once the files have been installed, you’ll notice they are all .jar files. Copy these to a place you can access easily. To start Ness Manager all you need to do is type java -jar BFHNessManager.jar while in the directory where you have Ness Manager installed in. Ness Manager works exactly as it does in Windows, which is great, and runs fast compared to BFHCC.

-John Havlik

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EOL Announcement

Posted by in Announcements

As of July 1st, 2010, Mtekk’s Testimonials and Iframe-B-Gone will reach EOL. The last time either of these plugins were updated was back in 2008. Since that time, much has changed and equivalent plugins have been released by other authors.

In the case of Iframe-B-Gone, the WordPress Exploit Scanner by Donncha O Caoimh is a all around better solution. It has more features, and does just about everything Iframe-B-Gone does, minus attempting to autofix issues—a stupidly dangerous thing to do, by the way.

As for Mtekk’s Testimonials, it needs a substantial overhaul with the advent of custom posts. There is also the problem that it uses mootools while just about everything else in WordPress uses jQuery. At the moment I am not interested in rewriting this plugin. In the future, if the need arises, this plugin may get rewritten, but I doubt it will be this year.

Both of these plugins will remain available into the foreseeable future. However, I will no longer support them after July 1st, 2010. All of the plugins about to be EOLed have been moved to the “Historical” subpage of “Code”, and will have their comments closed on their EOL date.

-John Havlik

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Breadcrumb NavXT Custom Post Type Support

Posted by in WordPress > Plugins

As part of my goals last week, I was working heavily on Breadcrumb NavXT’s custom post type support (after I finished up replacing my desktop’s motherboard with a more stable one). This work is ready for testing. So far, it has passed my development test cases and is ready for end user testing.

The implementation in the SVN trunk has one flaw. It doesn’t handle the “hierarchy flip” situation, where a post hierarchy can terminate with a post that is flat (e.g. it uses taxonomies to be located, not a post hierarchy). One standard example of this “hierarchy flip” is attachments to posts. They are hierarchical, but the parent post is not. Currently, this is handled using an “exception” for attachments. A proper solution would check and continue until it gets to the very top. However, this would impact performance, and is unnecessary for most sites (I need feedback on this, if it is an issue, I will provide support).

It looks like the 3.6 release will be moved up to late July, from August. I plan on having it ready for the translation team by July 14th. It looks like I’ll punt the multisite support extensions to the 3.7 release this fall.

-John Havlik

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