Enable Automatic Updates for Plugins Hosted by Developers

Currently WordPress doesn’t offer an easy way for plugins which are not hosted on wordpress.org to use its built-in automatic update feature.

Fortunately, I have found a quick and simple way to add this functionality to any plugin and allow plugin authors to take a complete control over when and how the updates are released. Read more »

Tabbed Widgets Now Better than Ever

Tabbed Widgets plugin for WordPress has been updated to include most of the features that users of the plugin have requested since it was first released. Here is a quick list of all the improvements that are available in version 0.71:

• An “invisible” sidebar or widgetized area is added to the list of the available sidebars automatically. Now you can easily prepare and configure the widgets that you want to use inside a tabbed interface. Previously you would have to manually edit template.php of your theme, but now the plugin does it for you and for every theme.
• The drop-down list of widgets that are available for placement inside a tabbed interface now includes titles of the widgets which makes it possible to distinguish between multiple text widgets, for example. Previously you could end up having multiple text and rss widgets without any way of determining which is which.
• Make any of the tabs open by default. Previously you could choose only a random or a hardcoded “start” tab.
• The horizontal tabs are now as smart as the accordion ones — the automatic rotation stops when a reader hovers it.
• Improved performance and significantly reduced database calls.

Notice: Version 0.7 has a bug which somehow makes some posts under ‘Edit’ section of WordPress dashboard to disappear. This is now fixed in 0.71.

Update Now

Get the latest version of Tabbed Widgets using the automatic plugin update feature within your WordPress dashboard, or from the dedicated page on WordPress Extend.

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Fixing «PostPost» and «Ozh’ Absolute Comments» Plugins

I use a modified version of the simple PostPost plugin created by Douglas Karr to display one sentence affiliate advertising in my RSS feed for entries that contain more than 700 letters.

Today I installed the very useful Ozh’ Absolute Comments plugin that makes the process of replying to comments a lot easier. However, when trying out the inline (and ajaxy) comment reply feature within the ‘Manage Comments’ section of WordPress admin for the first time, I got the following error message: Read more »

Solving the Authentication and Plugin Errors After an Upgrade to WordPress 2.5

The upgrade process to WordPress 2.5 was as smooth as it can possibly be — simple, fast and without a single error message. However, there were a few problems that became apparent only after the upgrade. This article will explain those issues in detail and show how to solve them. Here is a short list of problems solved:

1. When trying to log-in after the upgrade, the following error message is displayed: “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.”
2. Yet Another Related Posts plugin returns “Fatal error: Call to undefined function merge_filters() in … includes.php on line 73”.
3. Popularity Contest plugin returns “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error” when reactivated.

Read more »