June 28th, 2010

EOL Announcement

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

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

June 27th, 2010

Breadcrumb NavXT Custom Post Type Support

Posted by John Havlik 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

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

June 18th, 2010

Breadcrumb NavXT and Custom Post Types

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

As of a few minutes ago, Breadcrumb NavXT has preliminary support of custom post types. Note that this support is very basic. It essentially sees hierarchical custom posts and pages as the same thing, and all other post types as posts. This will be refined further in the coming weeks, where each post type will have it’s own options, a la taxonomies.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

June 14th, 2010

WP Lynx Preview

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

Ok, so I let the cat out of the bag yesterday (ha ha). Back on topic, WP Lynx is a project that I have been working on for a few months now, with the help of JD Hodges. It was his idea originally, and he came to me for to create the plugin (and thanks to him it’s now available to everyone).

June 11th, 2010

Canon S90

Posted by John Havlik in Reviews > Hardware

S90's image is on the left, the SD850's is to the right

After several years of trusty service (the first few months were a battle, but that’s besides the point), I’m replacing my PowerShot SD850 IS with something a little more advanced. Since I’m not ready to take the plunge into the world of DSLR, and didn’t want something terribly large, the S90 fit the bill. Simply put, there are too many things to love about the S90. It’s small (though slightly larger than the SD850), has a fast lens, has a large (for a ‘point and shoot’) sensor, and has a control right around the lens.