Diffs from WordPress plugins
Very cool. I updated a plugin of mine this morning and the WordPress plugin library sent me emails each time the SVN was updated with diffs of that update.
It’s something that may have always happened and the emails just never made it to me, but either way it’s cool.
Just A Tweet updated with a shortcode
Thanks to a suggestion from Chaim Just A Tweet now has a short code you can use inside your posts and pages.
The shortcode is just_a_tweet and you pass a twitteruser parameter. So if your Twitter account was bob you’d enter [ just_a_tweet twitteruser=bob ] inside your post (without the spaces next to the brackets). It’ll work exactly the same way as inserting a PHP call to the just_a_tweet php function but you don’t need to have php enabled for inside your posts.
The PHP code still works just like it did before so you can use the plugin in your themes outside of the loop.
You can download the new version from the WordPress plugin library or upgrade through WP admin.
Forum worth it?
At what point does it become beneficial to add a support forum to a site like this? I used to have one using bbPress but it got spammed so hard it just wasn’t worth the effort.
But I’ve been playing around with Vanilla Forums, and the comments have been building a bit so I’m thinking about opening a forum back up.
Thoughts?
Just A Tweet plugin
For another site of mine I needed a way to display the latest Tweet in the header. Sure, there are probably hundreds of Twitter plugins for WordPress. And there’s also code all over the internet to do the same. But what I couldn’t find was one that cached.
Without caching each time the page was viewed my server would have had to hit Twitter and parse out the JSON; not a good solution. So this little plugin caches the request into the options table and only refreshes when needed. By default it’s every 5 minutes, but you can change that.
Usage
Upload the plugin to your wp-content/plugins folder and activate.
Insert <?php just_a_tweet(‘username’); ?> into your theme where you’d like it to show up.
The just_a_tweet takes 4 parameters.
$twitterUser – Required – The Twitter user name of the account you want to use
$cacheAge – Optional – The number of minutes to wait until the cache is considered stale. Defaults to 5
$forceRefresh – Optional – If true, then the caching is not done. Defaults to false
$echo – Optional = If true the tweet is echoed. The function returns the tweet either way.
Download
Download from the WordPress plugin library
Link Footnotes plugin
Link Footnotes is a tiny, simple WordPress plugin that will create a list of all the external links in your posts and pages and append it to the bottom of your page.
Once activated, there is no work required on your part. The plugin takes care of parsing any external links out of your content and adding them to the list.
Options
Default On – You can decide whether you want the plugin to display links by default. Either way you set this, it can be overridden on individual posts using a meta fields on your posts.
Heading – Allows you to set HTML displayed above your links. Default is <h2>Links</h2>
Meta Fields
If there is content in either of these meta fields then they’ll trigger. lf_off takes precedence over lf_on.
lf_on – Force the links to display, even if default is off
lf_off – Force the links not to display
Download
You can download the Link Footnotes plugin from the WordPress plugin library.
Starting a new plugin – Link Footnotes
Had a thought for another plugin this morning and figured it might be a useful one.
Sometimes on long posts the links can get lost, so I’m going to see what I can do about putting together a plugin that will create a list of all the external links in a post or page down on the bottom as a footnote.
And I’m pretty much posting about it now so I have to do it and can’t just let the idea slide. Plus it lets me get the tag setup.
WordPress 3.0.5 available
Bug fix release for WordPress.
Auto Future Post WordPress plugin
Looking for a way to automatically schedule posts for X number of days past your current latest post?
On another blog I write a handful of posts at a time and schedule them out over several days. But I have to keep going back and forth to the post list to check dates. This plugin adds a link to the new post page that will automatically set the date for the post you’re working on based on the last post on your site. It’s a subtle little link. Take a look at the screen shot to the right. Notice where it says ‘Auto’ next to ‘Edit’. Clicking that will run an Ajax call that will get the next date.
Options
Two sets of options for you.
The start and end time are the earliest and latest times respectively that you want posts published. The plugin will pick a random time somewhere in between the two.
The day different between the last post and the newly scheduled post will be somewhere between min days and max days away from the current latest date. In the example above the next post will always be 2 days after the current latest, but if you want a little more randomness you can enter different numbers.
One note: The plugin does not necessarily use the date of the last post. If there is a future dated post it will schedule based on that date. If there aren’t any future dated posts it will date based on the current date.
Download
Goodbye forum…
Just in case you came here through a link… I decided to take the forum offline for a while. The last post was over a year ago, and pretty much every registration was a spam account. So for now, if you’ve got a question just use the blog comments. It’s probably easier anyway…
WordPress 3.0.4 upgrade
If you’re using an older version, now’s the time to upgrade. WordPress version 3.0.4 is available for download and fixes a critical security issue.