An update on two of my WordPress plugins: HeadSpace is now standing at version 3, and Filled In at version 1.6. Both have had extensive changes. HeadSpace now allows you to define meta data across all WordPress pages, as well as supporting Ecto. Filled In is a very powerful form management system that has had a major revamp and is now much more capable and even has the ability to add CAPTCHA images to forms.
Category: Software
Plugins, themes, and anything to do with software
Anti-spam and HeadSpace 2 plugins
There’s a revamp of an old plugin over at HeadSpace 2, and a new (not foolproof) Anti-Email Spam plugin.
HeadSpace 2 cleans up my oldest plugin, and gives it a nice administrative interface along with several nice new features. The Anti-Email spam plugin was some code that I developed for client that I thought might make a handy plugin for some people. It replaces any email addresses in a post with an encoded version that should fool spam harvesting software.
Giraffe2 – Wonky edition
Four months into the new year and a total of 2 posts. Not so good. I was working on a new version of my Giraffe theme that would allow all the page elements to be dragged around the screen, but it was taking too long and I just didn’t have time to finish it. Instead, I cleaned up what I already had, made it WordPress 2.0 compatible, and dropped in a few new features. Now presenting Giraffe2 – the slightly wonky edition.
The design remains largely the same. There are a few cosmetic changes, such as cleaning up header fonts, but the majority of changes are to increase configurability. To summarize them all:
- WordPress 2.0 only
- Supports WordPress widgets
- Options page now in the ‘Presentation’ section
- Layout can be configured to contain from 1 to 3 columns, in different sizes
- Dynamically generated CSS is separated from static CSS (so if you do customize the theme you won’t get annoyed when it starts over-writing all your code)
- AJAX comments support
- Footer content can be edited
- Logo is fully configurable, with a live-update feature – upload your own logos and background, and change sizes and positions
- Colour skins can now be plugged in
- Top navigation menu is configurable
AJAX Calendar
After all the hype and bubble-blowing, I decided to dip my little pinkie into the mix and experiment with AJAX. The result has been the release of a new plugin, cleverly titled ‘AJAX Calendar‘. Once installed this allows the standard WordPress calendar function to be enhanced such that:
- Stepping through the months is now asynchronous, and only updates the calendar
- Clicking on the calendar title takes you back to the current month
- Clicking on the funny «-» button will expand the calendar and display the posts headings for that month
- All content is cached
- Works in most browsers
The plugin requires modifications to the WordPress theme, although these modifications have been included in version 1.23 of the Giraffe theme.
Have a play.
Giraffe 1.20
It’s been such a long time since I’ve posted anything here, and this is just going to be a technical post. Based upon feedback from different users, and the general direction of questions, I’ve released quite a major update of the Giraffe theme and plugin. The changes are:
Major overhaul of the admin interface – redundant options have been removed, and the interface has been simplified. Where possible I have used diagrams to show what the configuration options will change- Easy logos – a ‘logo’ directory now exists within the giraffe theme, and any image placed within here can be selected as the logo by using the admin interface. Additionally, two extra options exist to allow the logo to be randomly selected, and a custom function can be created to select a logo using whatever method you wish
- Auto-news – the admin interface will now periodically check this website for changes to the theme, and will display this from inside the admin interface. This should make it easier for people to know when the theme has been updated
- Curved corners and the left bar can be switched off
- Comments order – comments can be displayed oldest first, or newest first
- Gravatars – can be disabled
- Calendar – can be disabled
- Localization menu – now built into the theme
- Most W3C validation errors fixed
A side effect of these changes will be that a lot of the administration interface is no longer localized properly. Hopefully it shouldn’t be too long before the new words can be translated.
More posts soon.
HTTP 406 Error
Some work I’ve been doing recently has involved debugging a Mambo installation. The website had developed the curious ability to block the editing of certain articles, but allowed other ones through. These blocked attempts to save articles were resulting in a ‘406 Not Acceptable’ error.
According to the W3 specification, this means:
The resource identified by the request is only capable of generating response entities which have content characteristics not acceptable according to the accept headers sent in the request.
Say what?
Japanese theme
Another addendum to the Giraffe theme, with a Japanese localization courtesy of Tai. The .mo file can be found on the Giraffe page, and the WordPress localization file on the WordPress localization page. Test it out from the sidebar Localization menu.
Thanks once again to Tai.
Adding a localization menu to WordPress
You may have noticed a small drop-down menu labelled ‘Localisation’ in the sidebar of this blog. It’s something I’ve been playing about with since localising the Giraffe theme and, while it doesn’t magically translate the entire blog, it does provide a viewer with a simple method to change the locale.
But what is a locale? In WordPress terms it refers to the framework around which your posts are displayed. That is, the words, phrases, dates, and times, that surround your posts. For example:
Try the live version now, if you want. You’ll need a Chinese font to display the Chinese localisation, but the others should work fine.
Giraffe in Italian and Spanish
A big thanks to Stefano Aglietti and Mario Núñez Molina for providing localizations of the Giraffe theme in Italian and Spanish. I’ve added a small localization selector in the sidebar so that people can change the theme language and see what it looks like. It doesn’t translate the posts, but it provides dates and other phrases in the chosen language, making for a better experience for non-English speakers.
Giraffe theme update
My Giraffe theme has now been updated. I’ve made some pretty major changes and these are summarised below:
- The theme is fully localised! I don’t have any translations yet, but once I release the relevant parts then hopefully people can translate the theme into their own language – no more hacking the theme to bits.
- Administrator interface. The support plugin now adds it’s own interface into the administration section. From here you can configure many aspects of theme’s appearance, such as colour scheme. More details in the themes section.
- Extra information can be inserted into the sidebar by creating a file ‘sidebar-extra.php’ and filling it with whatever you want. This saves you having to modify the core theme files.
- The layout can be configured to have the sidebar below the lead content, or to the side of it
Hopefully I’ve tracked down any problems already.