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Vent version 0.8 released
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I have just made available Vent version 0.8 on the Vent Google code page. It should also have made it’s way to the WordPress extend plugin pages as well by now, so you can also grab it from there if required.
This is a bug fix release that solves the problem of a future event post displaying a 404 Not found error when the title is clicked on or a “Read More…” link is clicked.
All users on the latest version of WordPress should upgrade to this version.
Vent version 0.7 is released
Version 0.7 is a bug fix release of the Vent events plugin and should fix the issue with the submit button not showing on the options form in Internet Explorer.
It is available for download from the Vent plugin page and also on the WordPress Extend site (a link to which should show on your plugins page for those who have it installed).
Vent is now on WordPress Extend
This is just a short post to let those interested that the Vent plugin is now available from the WordPress Extend plugin site.
The current version available via that site is 0.6 which fixes a couple of messages that hadn’t been set up for translation correctly. Other than that, functionality remains the same as version 0.5
Updates, changes and downloads
I am still in the process of making a few changes to the clearskys.net site and deciding what to clear out, what to keep and what to ignore and hope that it will go away.
What is going.
- The forum. It has been neglected for a while now, so I am going to clear it out and have a re-think about whether to host a forum myself or use Google Groups which I have started using for the StayPress and HoardHunter systems.
What is changing.
- Development site (dev.clearskys.net). This get’s a lot of traffic, so rather than get rid, I may just re-engineer it. It is currently powered by pmWiki. Again, it hasn’t been updated since the server move so is getting drastically out of date.
- Blog Plugins page. Oops this seems like a broken record, again it’s drastically out of date.
Download links
Some of the download links on various pages (the older plugins) no longer work (some of the demos don’t either). Please be assured that I will be going through these to get everything back up and running and looking nice.
In the meantime, here are the locations were you can get all of my current plugins and software
- Miscellaneous plugins - such as Author Message, Hoard Hunter and Google Ajax
- Property plugins - such as Booking Manager, Availability calendar and enquiries form.
- MyDashboard - the MyDashboard plugin
- Vent - the latest Vent plugin
- MultiDb - the WordPress MU Multi-database plugin (advanced users only).
WPMU plugin competition
Only weeks after taking over the running of WPMU.org, James and Andrew from Incsub have announced a competition solely for WordPress MU compatible plugins.
The prize fund currently stands at $250 plus 2x WPMUdev premium memberships (worth $250 each)
Marking a post as an event - a clarification
So far I’ve not had many error or bug reports for the Vent system, hopefully that is because it is simple to use rather than people just giving up and uninstalling it. A few questions have come up, however so I thought I would take five minutes to clarify one or two things.
Can a post be both a post and an event?
Once a post is identified as an event it is taken out of the normal blog hierarchy as
it’s status is changed from “post” to “event” and thus isn’t picked up by the
standard WordPress Loop query that is used to populate the blog. So a post can not be
an Event AND a Post at the same time.
Do I need to enter an end date?
You don’t need to enter an end date for the system to work. It is only “really”
required if you want to ensure that the generated hCalendar microformats are correct
for people who are going to export the event to a calendar application. An event
without an end date will still export but will default (depending on the calendar
application) to a 30 minute event.
Why does the system default to being disabled after I’ve activated it?
The Vent system starts in a disabled state for two reasons. Firstly, when it is first activated it doesn’t know what criteria you want to use to identify an event. If it was enabled from the start then it would mark ALL future posts as events from that point onwards.
Secondly, the Vent plugin is designed to also run in WordPress MU as well as the standard WordPress. In WordPress MU ALL plugins are activated by default. So if a user doesn’t want to use the Vent system they can disable it from within the settings page (WordPress MU users don’t have access to the plugins page).
Only when in an enabled state does the Vent system “Hook” into WordPress and start checking posts. So a disabled Vent system should have little to no processing overhead on a blog (or multiple blogs in WordPress MU’s case).
A short week ahead
Today marks the start of a short week with a full weeks worth of work that I have to cram in, so I thought I’d get some updates posted in case I don’t have the time later on.
StayPress
Development is chugging along, though it took a little bit of a back seat last week whilst I attempted to get my entry into this years Weblogtoolscollection.com plugin competition completed. The good news, however, is that some of the solutions I discovered for my entry will streamline parts of the code in StayPress and has helped me find some solutions to the little stumbling blocks I came across. So onwards and upwards this week.
Vent
More details on my entry into the aforementioned competition is available here. It is a system designed to allow you to use the scheduled posts functionality of WordPress to manage events. If you like it then please consider popping along to the plugin competition blog and voting for it.
Hoard Hunter
The Hoard Hunter game is still ongoing and there are still a lot of sectors remaining. It only costs $5 to enter and all proceeds go to Oxfam and the Gurkha Welfare trust. On top of that you could win an iPod Shuffle. The theme and plugin for the Hoard Hunter system are also now available for download so that you can run your own game online.
A Weekend of Madness
On Saturday and Sunday (19th and 20th July 2008) I will be attempting to run 100km from Petersfield, across the South Downs to Brighton (in the UK) with 3 other team mates, carrying our equipment on our backs. It is a distance of 100km (two mararthons + an extra 10km added on to the end). If you would like to support this moment of madness then please consider sponsoring me (or entering Hoard Hunter above). All sponsors will be appropriately credited and thanked (in a manner I haven’t fully worked out yet, but at the least your site will be linked back to).
I will be recovering in a public house in Brighton following the event (early afternoon of the 20th July). If you would like to meet up for a drink and a chat then keep an eye on my Twitter account for more details of the place I end up (it will in all likely hood be near Brighton Racecourse, which is the finishing point). I will be the dirty, smelly person in the corner trying to get the bar staffs attention (and/or calling for a nurse).
Plugin Factory
And finally the Plugin Factory is about to be reborn. When it was intitially launched I received quite a bit of interest for custom plugin development. Unfortunately I had to take the factory offline as my other workload increased to the point that I had very little time (on top of that I had moved so was without a reliable ADSL connection). Now, fingers crossed, I should be getting a brand new ultra-fast line connected soon and to celebrate will be launching the all new Plugin Factory, stay posted for more details.
Vent - version 0.1 released
Update: Now I have more time, I’ll add a few more detail to this post.
Vent is a plugin that allows you to use the scheduled posts functionality within WordPress to add and list events on your blog. It identifies a post as an event using a user-defined criteria so that the standard Scheduled posts functionality will still operate as before.
The plugin works with standard WordPress and can also be installed within WordPress MU for activation across all hosted blogs.
More details and installation, setup instructions can be found on the following page:
http://blog.clearskys.net/plugins/vent-events-system/
Download
Click below to download the latest version of this plugin.
Old Post is below
This is just a short note as I have to shoot out of the door in about 5 minutes.
I have just made available version 0.1 of the Vent system which is my entry into the Weblogtoolscollection.com competition.
More details and a download link can be found here.
Let me know what you think.
Vent - events system
Vent is my entry into the Weblogtoolscollection.com plugin competition. Please consider voting for this plugin here.
The Vent events system allows you to use the standard WordPress scheduled posts functionality to enter, list and manage future events.
The administrator can setup the criteria that the Vent system uses to identify an Event. This enables you to continue to enter scheduled posts into WordPress (and more importantly, for them to function exactly as before) whilst still using the new Event functionality.
The simplest criteria is to mark any events with a distinct category or tag, alternatively you can use any combination of the settings shown above, including looking for a string at the start of a post title (such as “Event:”).
Installation
The Vent system is compatible with standard WordPress and WordPress MU. The version of WordPress you have will determine where you install the plugins files.
Standard WordPress
- Download and unarchive the plugins Zip file. This will create a vent directory on your computer
- Upload the Vent directory (and it’s contents) to the wp-content/plugins directory of your WordPress install.
- Log in to your WordPress administration system, go to the Plugins page and Activate the Vent plugin.
WordPress MU
- Download and unarchive the plugins Zip file. This will create a vent directory on your computer.
- Open the vent directory so that you can see the files it contains.
- Upload the vent.php and ventincludes directory (and it’s contents) into the wp-content/mu-plugins directory of your WordPress MU install.
- Plugins placed in the mu-plugins directory are automatically activated.
Enabling the Vent system
Once the plugin is activated, it will remain in an disabled state. This is because you have yet to tell the system how to identify an event from a post. Before enabling the system you need to make a decision about how you would like to mark your future events.
As mentioned before the simplest option is to create a new category or tag called something like “Event” and mark every future event with that category or tag.
Let us, for arguments sake, assume that we have created a tag on our system called “event” and will be using that to identify all of our events.
Goto the Settings page in your WordPress administration system and click on the Vent sub-menu.
On this page you will see a series of settings, for now we will deal with the main ones. Go through each of the settings listed below and switch them to your liking.
- Event identifier - In our example we are using the tag “event”, so I will select my tag in the second line and leave the other two lines (1 and 3) alone.
- Highlight on Home page - The Vent system can automatically display the next (upcoming) event at the top of your blog/sites home page. If you would like the next event displayed on your page then selected “Enabled” here. The second option on this line concerns the styles that are applied to the event. This can help mark the next event out from the rest of your posts. You have the option of using the plugins own styles, or disabling the style generation and using those set up in your themes style sheet.
- Internal highlight style - If you chose to use the plugins Internal styles then this is were you can change them. The most important part of these style is the post identifier (#post-%postid%). The Vent plugin will replace the %postid% value with the ID number of the next event so that it is only that post that the styles are applied to. If your theme doesn’t use the #post-xx naming convention, then you will need to change this setting.
- Make past events into posts - Setting this to “Enabled” will reset any historical events back into posts. This will ensure that the events remain with your blog/sites post hiearchy and show up in the correct historical position.
- hCalendar status - The Vent system adds some hCalendar markup to each event. You can use this setting to decide how this information is displayed. hCalendar markup enables other sites and search engines to find and parse the event information on your blog/site.
- hCalendar export link - This allows you to add a link to a hCalendar parsing website from your Events details. There are a number of these sites (including Technorati) that can parse the hCalendar information held on your page and return an iCal file that you can import into a calendar application (such as Google Calendar, iCal or Outlook).
Once you have set up these options, set the Vent system status option to “Enabled” and then save the options by clicking on the button at the bottom of the page. We will go over the other options available a little later on.
Now you can start adding some events into your system.
Adding an Event
To add an event you simply go to the Write menu and start entering the details just as you would with a normal WordPress post.
Once you have entered the details about your event, click on the “Edit” link next to the Publish immediately text on the right hand side of the Post page.
This will open the date and time form so that you can enter the Start Date and Start Time of your event.
Once you have entered the starting date and time, you next need to enter the end date and time. Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t provide a standard form for this, so instead we need to add a key field to our post.
Scroll down towards the bottom of the Post page until you see a box labelled “Custom Fields”, if it is closed then click on the little arrow to its left.
Into the form that is displayed, we need to enter something like the following:
The Key is “event_enddate”. The value is the date and time in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:Mins. The system will recognise other formats, but this one is the safest and most reliable.
After entering the end date and time, click on the “Add Custom Field” button. You are then ready to Publish your post. Scroll back up to the top of the page and click “Publish” at the top right hand side.
Once your post is published, click on the Manage menu and you should now see something similar to the image at the very top of this page, with your new post identified as an event.
Viewing Events
If you set up your blog/site to show the next event at the top of the home page, then navigating to your site should show the post you have just entered at the top of the page.
There are also two sidebar widgets available (if you theme supports them) to show the Next Event or a list of up to 15 Upcoming events.
Some examples of Event views
Event Pages
The final options that we skipped on the Settings -> Vent menu allow us to set up page URL’s specifically to show our events.
You should only change these options if you understand them. The default settings will work for most (english based) websites.
An example of the default settings is (assuming your site is myblog.com):
- http://myblog.com/events/today - will show all the events taking place today
- http://myblog.com/events/nextweek - will show all the events taking place next week
- and so on…
The final option on the settings page allows you to reset all of the posts that you have marked as events, back to what they would be if the Vent system wasn’t being used. If you decide to stop using the Vent system, then you should do this prior to deleting the plugin.
Download
Click on the link below to download the latest version of the Vent system
Support
I have setup a Google Code repository for the Vent system that incorporates a support and Issue tracker, so please use that for any issues you find..
Hoard Hunter - the plugin
The main plugin (version 0.5) for the Hoard Hunter game is now available for download from the link below.
This initial version requires that payments received via PayPal are approved manually. There will be an update very soon with a more integrated PayPal option. If you would like to be notified of new releases of the game plugin and / or would like installation and running support then please consider making a charitable donation using the Donate button below. Donors will be invited to the private Hoard Hunter group where support, ideas, update notifications and links to development versions of the system will be posted.
