Clearskys.net Blog

Updates, changes and downloads

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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 Again, it hasn’t been updated since the server move so is getting drastically out of date.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 Oops this seems like a broken record, again it’s drastically out of date.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).

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.

Truly Humbled

All I can really say is “Wow, Thanks, I wasn’t expecting that”.

The response to the Introducing StayPress post has been more than I ever expected. What I imagined to be a set of plugins with a limited niche audience seems to have been picked up by a number of more mainstream sites.

Special thanks go to (amongst the hundreds of others who posted):

• Matt at ma.tt - Who single handedly managed to test that I had my server setup correctly with the traffic surge.
• Andrea at WPMUTutorials.com
• 4realz.net
• BlogHerald

Work continues on the plugins, so thank you to everyone for their patience, obviously (well to me anyway) these plugins are quite complex so the development isn’t as quick as I would want but it is getting closer to an initial alpha release.

Making the move to PHP5

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

Small Property plugin - sneaky look

This blog and support forum have been a little bit quiet over the past fortnight as I have been concentrating on the development of our new family of Property and booking management plugins.

I have decided to take a more radical approach with the latest versions and have scrapped a large amount of the existing plugin code. The new approach is based on an MVC model and should get rid of a lot of the complexity caused from developing each area as a separate plugin, and mean the entire system will function within a single, coherent interface.

This also means that a large portion of the code-base (namely the user-interface) is completely platform independent. I already have the currently developed code running on both the WordPress and MODx systems.

More »

WordPress 2.3 upgrade available and other news

Well the big day arrived and WordPress 2.3 was finally released to the world. As I had already prepared a few of my blogs using the steps here, all I had to do was SSH into my server, go to each blog directory and type:

svn up

It took all of five minutes in total with no side effects (at time of writing).

There are more guides to upgrading your WordPress blog to the latest version at the Weblogtoolscollection.com site.

Plugin Subversion details

I have added a page to our development site with instructions and links to the Subversion repositories for all of our current range of released and in-development plugins.

If you want to stay on the (b)leading edge then this is the place to find all the details.

MyDashboard and WordPress 2.3

The MyDashboard plugin works quite well with the latest version of WordPress, however there is a problem with one of the standard gadgets so far.

The standard WordPress blog statistics gadget is looking for the now non-existent categories table and so will display an error if it is displayed on your Dashboard. The error is displayed above the gadget itself, so you can still (and should) click on the X to remove the statistics gadget.

I will have a new WordPress 2.3 compatible gadget out soon (I will post when it is available for download).

igoogle.com uses Yahoo YUI grids css styles

Whilst messing around on the igoogle.com (or google.com/ig - whichever url you prefer) in CSSEdit, I spotted one or two familiar looking CSS classes and element names being used, namely #doc3, yui-b, yui-gb and yui-u.

And, indeed, after extracting the style sheet from the site, right down the bottom is the following chunk of CSS:

/* ===============BEGIN BSD LICENSED PORTION============= */
/*
Copyright (c) 2007, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Code licensed under the BSD License:
http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt
version: 2.2.0
*/
#modules .yui-b {
position:static;
display:block;
margin:0 0 1em 0;
float:none;
width:auto;
overflow:hidden;
}
.yui-gb .yui-u {
float:left;
margin-left:2%;
*margin-left:1.895%;
width:32%;
}
.yui-gb div.first {
margin-left:0;
}
#modules,.yui-gb {
zoom:1;
}
/* ===============END BSD LICENSED PORTION============= */

A stripped down version of the Yahoo grid css style sheet, but there it is.

SMS, iTagg and Facebook - progress updates

As a side effect from this post, and the suggestions of alternative mobile providers from a number of people (thank you, it was much appreciated) the following changes have been made, or are in the process of being made to the upcoming version of the enquiry form plugin:

• Removed support for the iTagg SMS platform API.
• Added API based support for 2 alternative providers, one european based and one US based.
• Will add a generic SMS by email interface that can be used with your own SMS message provider if required.
• In the process of completing the incoming SMS API, but it will now be more customisable rather than being based on the iTagg API.

We have “procured” the services of a new talented young developer for a short period of time. He is looking more closely into the Facebook API, amongst other things.

As a consequence, we have the opportunity to produce some quick applications for that platform, and have been thinking about interfacing the Availability calendar and Enquiry form plugins so they can be viewed (or used in the case of the Enquiry form) directly in your Facebook profile.

If you have an interest in seeing these produced, then let me know by email or by commenting below. If there isn’t much interest then we will move on with a couple of other applications first.

Enquiry and Contact plugin bugfix

I have just uploaded a quick bug fix for the Enquiry and Contact form plugin.

This bug only occurs if you have both the Enquiry plugin and the Booking plugin activated at the same time and you are using the “Create booking” option from the enquiry admin pages.

If you are not using this functionality, then you do not need to download the fixed version of this plugin.

To get the new version, please visit the enquiry form plugin page and click on the Download button.