Category: Software

Plugins, themes, and anything to do with software

Redirection on Github

Redirection is now being developed on Github. I’ve been running it there for a few months now and have already received several pull requests and fixes. It’s a good place for other people to contribute.

It’s also the best place to report any bugs or feature suggestions (anything sent to me by email tends to disappear into a black hole, and patrolling the WordPress.org forums is very time-consuming).

If you’d like to run with the latest version of the plugin then please do use the Github repo as the canonical ‘trunk’ version. The more people that do this, the less likely I am to release something that breaks sites.

I’ve yet to put a working git-to-SVN system together so I’ll manually sync things over to the WordPress.org SVN repository when ready for release.

That all-important link:

https://github.com/johngodley/redirection

I look forward to seeing how it develops!

Redirection – seven years old

Many people have contacted me to say that Redirection is broken with the latest versions of WordPress, outputting this message:

PHP Warning: Missing argument 2 for wpdb::prepare()

I’ve known about this for a long while, it’s a very easy fix, and in fact it’s been fixed for a long while – Redirection 2.3.2 has been available in SVN for many months. However, it was accompanied by some other structural changes in the plugin that may have actually, for real, broken things and so I’ve held off releasing it as a general update.

In the intervening time I’ve had my hands busy with other things, but have finally finished the release for public consumption, and the message is no more. Hurrah!

All this to say that if you nag me long enough I’ll eventually remember to do something.

For the pedants like me, it wasn’t actually broken – it’s a warning – and if you were seeing this on a production website then I’d very much advise disabling error messages.

While writing this release post I noticed that the plugin is over seven years old. Seven!

Sequel Pro Tips: table filters and auto-suggest

Sequel Pro is great, and there are a few tricks to make it even greater. If you have a database with a lot of tables then the table filter field is useful:

A neat tip is that you can use the pipe character as a logical OR operator, so you can show tables that match several conditions. Below is post|comment – tables that match post or comment:

Very handy if you have to swap between tables that are lost in a big list. You can chain together many filters in this way.

Another nice feature is the SQL auto-suggest. From the query tab, press escape as you are typing out a table or column name:

A box appears with matching suggestions. You can use cursor up/down to move between suggestions, and enter to select.

Remote editing with Sublime Text 2

I’ve been quite taken with Sublime Text 2 recently, and I’ve been trying to find a way to introduce it into my daily work flow. While it’s perfect for editing files locally, it doesn’t have any built-in remote editing facilities such as Coda. As I work remotely, this is a pain.

I do have ExpanDrive, and depending on the speed of your server, this can work fairly well. However, you do miss out on some of the extra features of Sublime Text, such as ‘find in files’ and web development plugins.

I’ve experimented a bit with a mix of rsync and directory watches, but the best solution has been the simplest, and also a quick introduction into the world of Python.

Using the Sublime Text API, I wrote a plugin to monitor any changes to a file and simply scp (secure copy) it across to my remote server. All password details are already setup by dint of it going over SSH.

Continue reading Remote editing with Sublime Text 2

WordPress Rename Media plugin

Another small plugin, this one renames media files that have been uploaded through WordPress. Although you can rename the title of an image, the underlying file still has the original filename (IMG_1234.jpg, for example). This plugin ensures that the filename changes along with the title.

Rename Media plugin.

Extended Comments Widget

One of the widgets that I’ve had running on this blog since before widgets existed (in WordPress land, anyway) is an ‘extended comments’ area. This is similar to the default comments widget, but shows more detail.

I’ve packaged it up and made it available in the WordPress.org plugin directory, naturally called Extended Comments Widget.

PageView 1.5

So my second plugin update in a week, quite a record this year! This time it’s one of the oldest plugins on this site (the readme.txt file said it worked on WordPress 1.3) – PageView.

Enough people were still writing in, all asking the same question – can I make it borderless. Now you can. The plugin has taken a leap into 3.0 and uses the shortcode API, and strips out the stuff that wasn’t being used, while adding a bunch more flexibility.