wordpress | Arron Woods

Back with wordpress 2.5 (RC1)

It has been a while since a post, I was hoping I wouldn’t slip in to a bad routine. Thanks for the comments so far, especially for the rb-internal-links plugin, can’t believe so many people are using it! Need to find a way to push it out there to more people if I can.

Back on topic, I’ve just installed release candidate 1 of the new version of wordpress. Matt mentioned on his blog that it would be a big one and it certainly is! From what I can tell the admin panel has been majorly revamped, both design wise and code wise. Logging in after the upgrade I had a few doubts but the new administration panel is impressively better (I liked the old one anyway). So far no major issues in upgrading from 2.4.x but I can see that I need to fix up the internal links plugin as the button has disappeared from the wysiwyg editor.

An update to the RB Internal Links plugin

I’ve neglected both the plugin and the blog a little lately due to the run up to Christmas but have made some time to release a major upgrade to rb internal links.

Some of the new features include:

Changing the charset to utf-8 for tinymce plugin (thanks to vanco)
A switch from the {{ … }} method to <!– … –> for entering a link
Putting in the option for ID or slug returned to editor, default to be ID (good idea, thanks again vanco)
Support for creating an internal link with an image
The intlink code is now hidden in visual mode, replaced with the highlighted text
The parsing engine has been completely rewritten for speed and scalability
Some code changes that should help people with problems related to the wysiwyg icon not turning up
Added filter for ‘the_content_rss’

I’d like to thank everybody that has commented on the blog so far regarding the plugin, it has been more popular than I had hoped for and I really appreciate it. More feedback, ideas and code very welcome!

My second plugin

RB Internal Example As promised I’ve written another wordpress plug-in. I am hoping this plug-in will become a useful tool for bloggers when linking to posts and pages within their sites.

When I came to link to a couple of pages from my {{post id=”extras” text=”Extras”}} page I presumed there would be an easy way to do this. I couldn’t find one anywhere and there didn’t seem to be any plugins either. I took a look at the plugin ideas forum over at wordpress and it seems I wasn’t the only one wanting a simple and flexible way to add internal links to my posts.

For more information and to download the beta version of this plugin visit the {{post id=”rb-internal-links-plugin” text=”plugin page”}}.

Random Blog Article WordPress Plugin

Introducing my first ever word press plug-in: Random Blog Article v1.0 (yay!).

Having set-up wordpress and had a play around I was very impressed by

the usability of the administration panel
how powerful and yet easy to install the plugins were

I did some research in to how wordpress had done this and discovered that making a plug-in myself wouldn’t be too difficult. On a side note, if you are interested in developing a plug-in, definitely start here: Writing a Plugin

On to the plug-in (at last). For more information on what it does, how to download it and how to install it, click {{post id=”random-blog-article-plugin” text=”here”}}.

Put simply it is a replacement for the blogroll only it displays just one random article from each of your favourite blogs and, by default, only one at a time. More than one at a time will have to wait for v1.1 if people take up any interest. At a set interval the current blog and article is replaced with a random new one via AJAX.

Using the admin panel page you can add as many of your favourite blogs to the plug-in as you wish, all cached to keep things speedy.

Take a look at the screenshots or just scroll to the top of the page for a preview.

It is in-fact a lot like the “Hot Blog” plug-in I’ve seen on the WordPress Stats dashboard page. I couldn’t find any plug-ins like it, hence writing my own. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were in fact hundreds and I was just looking in the wrong place but at least I can say I tried! 🙂

I’m thinking for my next plug-in, something that will allow me to easily link to other posts and pages within a blog without having to put in the full URL. That way if I ever change my permalink structure (for some strange reason) I don’t have to go back and change all my links. After some research I could only find one other plug-in like it which was Easy Post-To-Post. Please let me know if there is already a better way of doing this and I’ll stop reinventing the wheel.

Testing cat link