Clearskys.net Blog

Making the move to PHP5

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Following on from this post made late last year, I have decided to move forward with PHP5 based development where it is appropriate.

This doesn’t mean that all future versions of our plugins will require PHP5, but if a particular bit of functionality can be developed quicker using PHP5 only code, then that will be the way I will approach it.

Also, whilst I am on the subject of backward compatibility, as WordPress 2.5 brings with it a brand new design to the administration system, I will also be working to this design for the plugin administration pages (though for the time-being I’m stuck because WordPress MU still has the old look).

So far only the development versions of the Property plugin and MyDashboard 0.5 are PHP5 only

WordPress 2.5

Hi all
I’ve been busy beavering away behind the scenes on a few new plugins and websites which I hope to be announcing shortly. In the meantime, the WordPress team have announced the release of WordPress 2.5. They haven’t made a 2.5 tag for this release in their SVN repository yet, so those of us who are upgrading via SVN will need to use the Trunk for now (if you don’t know what this all means read here).

I’ve just installed the latest version on my development server, and can report that so far the latest version of MyDashboard looks to be working correctly. If anyone would like to write a “Right Now” dashboard gadget or work on a style to emulate the new WordPress dashboard then please let me know and I will look to include your work in a new release.

In the meantime, it’s back to the grindstone for me.

Author Message Plugin 0.1

I am pleased to announce the initial release of the Author Message plugin.

This plugin allows you to quickly and easily add an image and a short message or bio for the author of a post/page to the bottom of the post, without the need to modify your theme templates or stylesheet. It would be ideal for use on a multi-author blog with a Newspaper / Magazine style layout. Or, in fact, anywhere you would want to display a little bit of information about the author underneath their article.

The default style looks a little bit like the image below (and a lot like the message at the bottom of this post), though it is easily customisable in both look and layout from within the plugins options page.

Author Message uses the Gravatar system to display the author image based on the email address in their WordPress profile page and the About Yourself text as the message.

More details on this plugin and installation instructions can be found on this page. You can download the plugin using the link below.

More »

MyDashboard release delay

I planned to post the news today that I would be waiting until the WordPress 2.4 release before the next release of MyDashboard.

I wanted to see what new functionality was being introduced for the Admin dashboard so that I could judge the best way forward for the future development of the plugin (and even whether it was still needed).

However, it would now appear that the scheduled WordPress 2.4 release has been skipped in favour of a 2.5 release in March.

So I guess some re-thinking is in order and I’ll have to go and re-arrange my schedule.

REST api interface plugin - PHP4 or PHP5?

This is just a short post to ask for some advice and/or opinions.

I am working on the generic XML and JSON generating functions as part of the REST interface plugin that is currently in development.

I have started using the plugin in-house with good results and performance, but as we are running PHP5 pretty much exclusively here - it makes use of the native PHP5 XML and JSON functionality.

My question is - is it worth me providing a PHP4 version which uses external libraries? Or, more to the point - how many people out there are still running on PHP4 based servers?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

MyDashboard - something for the weekend

Well the weekend is upon us once more, and yet again I have managed to get through less than half of the tasks on my ever expanding to do list.

So to keep you entertained, I thought I would post a couple of screen shots showing some of the things I have been working on over the past week.

MyDashboard is moving steadily towards the version 0.5 release and I now have some of the new functionality and API up and running. There is quite a bit of work to go before a beta release yet but things seem to be moving along with few hiccups.

Have a look at the two gadget screen captures below and see if you can work out what they are (other than a Weather gadget and a calculator gadget…).

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Spotmilk administration theme - mirror

Update: As per Sungwha’s comment further down - I have redirected the links to point back to the new resurrected site. I also notice that version 2.2.2 of Spotmilk is now available, so go grab it.

It appears that Sungwha Park, the author of the fabulous Spotmilk admin theme I mentioned back in July, has disappeared. Well the website and download for the Spotmilk theme have anyway.

I do hope everything is alright, but in the meantime I have made available the latest version of the theme that I have access to (v2.2.1). You can download it from this link (mirror).

If anyone has access to a newer version then please pass it along and I will make it available as well.

Sungwha: As soon as you get back online, please drop me a line and I will redirect this link to your site.

Plugin sponsorship redux

I have been going backwards and forwards regarding my initial thoughts on Plugin sponsorship back in early September. In fact the sponsorship form and details have made it live on the site a number of times before being removed again for editing (the most recent of which was only last week).

I have decided, in the end, to take an entirely different approach.

I will be offering advertising on the side bar of this site (underneath the Featured Sites over on the right). There will be the option of Home page or Full site advertising and the option of a text link or a 125×125 advertising box.

To test the advertising out, I will initially be offering rock bottom prices.

• Home page only - $10 per month.
• Full site - $15 per month.

If you would like to advertise, please use the contact form on our About page until I re-edit the Sponsors page text.

The main reason for dropping the sponsored plugin plan is the introduction of our new plugin development service, the Plugin Factory.

Noticing the ever increasing number of fixed price "PSD to XHTML" services, it was becoming obvious that whilst the design and style of a web-site was being catered for, the programming and functionality side of the equation was left wanting.

Hopefully we can address the balance by providing a fixed price plugin development service. If you have always dreamed of having a specific piece of functionality on your web site or blog but couldn’t find a plugin that accomplished it then maybe we can help.

Whilst we are more than happy to develop private plugins just for your use, we have added a special option for those community minded individuals who want to share their plugin with the rest of the world.

Take a look at the Plugin Factory page for more information. The details are still in the early stages so we welcome any feedback you may have.

Fixing MyDashboard 0.3.1 Fatal errors

This will (hopefully) affect very few of you. Though it all depends on how you (or your web host) have setup the configuration of PHP for your site.

If you get a "Fatal Error" report when you try to activate the MyDashboard plugin in WordPress, then you will need to download the following file: mydashboard.php and use it to replace your existing copy in the mydashboard directory.

For the technically minded, I used the PHP short tag (<?) in one of the functions instead of the safer (<?php) this new version replaces the short tag with the longer version. More details on PHP short tags and other PHP.INI settings can be found here.

This fix will be in all future versions of the MyDashboard plugin, as I have had few reports of problems so far I thought it easier to highlight the fix rather than build a new release around the change of a single line of code.

MyDashboard 0.3.1a on WordPress Extend

In our recent transfer of the the MyDashboard plugin to the WordPress extend site, it appears I missed a directory from the transfer.

This has now been fixed and the WordPress extend download should now work correctly.
In order to ensure that the change was picked up I changed the version to 0.3.1a. If you are currently running version 0.3.1 and downloaded it directly from our site then you do not need to upgrade as the WordPress extend 0.3.1a version is identical.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Thanks to Richie for spotting this mistake.