For the next release of the Widget Context plugin I have two goals — simplified user interface and code clean-up to eliminate PHP notices.

However, due to the complex logic of combined ‘show’ and ‘hide’ visibility rules, I haven’t yet settled on the final layout and naming of various buttons and labels. Therefore, it would be really great if you could take a look at this video and leave your feedback in the comments. There is also a working demo of the UI.

Video:

Related posts

1. Widget Context UI Update 2011, Version 2
2. Widget Context User Interface Update
3. Widget Context Update — Word Count Check

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. The solution consist of two parts:

1. filtering the contents of get_transient('update_plugins') under wp_update_plugins() in /wp-includes/update.php, and
2. providing your own update API.

Here is a working (and a very basic) example of a plugin and an API (works with WordPress 2.8).

This solution also enables developers to sell their plugins and still retain the convenience of automatic updates for their users.

Related posts

1. Automatic Updates for Plugins and Themes Hosted Outside WordPress Extend
2. Automatic Updates for Developer Hosted Themes
3. Enable WordPress Plugin, Theme Updates and Pretty Permalinks on Nginx

Show your love for open source — say Thanks and donate. Get the developers’ enthusiasm flowing.

Related posts

1. WordPress Plugins which I Use
2. Enable Automatic Updates for Plugins Hosted by Developers
3. Proprietary vs. Liberal vs. GNU GPL

Therefore only today I discovered that leaving comments on this blog has been impossible for a while already. Turns out that changes in the WordPress core have made the OpenID plugin unaware of the comment author’s name and e-mail.

Haven’t found a solution yet.

The Solution

Open comments.php within the OpenID plugin folder and move the name & email input verification from line 73:

// duplicate name and email check from wp-comments-post.php
openid_require_name_email();

right after line 68, like this:

// just ignore the error... it just means the user entered a normal URL.
if (array_key_exists('openid_identifier', $_POST)) {
	openid_repost_comment_anonymously($_SESSION['openid_comment_post']);
	// duplicate name and email check from wp-comments-post.php
	openid_require_name_email();
}

Why this works

We need to check name and e-mail input only if the URL is not an OpenID.

Related posts

1. OpenID SeatBelt plugin for Firefox
2. OpenID and PHP 5.3
3. How to Be Your Own OpenID Provider and Use Your blog’s URL for Identification

Related posts

1. Widget Context Plugin Added to the Official Plugin Repository
2. Widget Logic plugin for WordPress
3. Request for Feedback: Widget Context UI Update 2011, v1

Admin CSS (my own), Akismet, Chunk Urls for WordPress, Comment Saver, Custom Function Widgets (mine), del.icio.us for WordPress, Digg & Reddit Me (almost completely rewritten by me), FeedBurner FeedSmith, Feed Universe (mine), Filosofo Comments Preview, Get Recent Comments, Google XML Sitemaps, Grunion Contact Form (heavily modified), Insights, KB Advanced RSS Widget, MiniPosts2, Nonce, Please!, OpenID, Peter’s Blog URL Shortcodes, PHP Speedy WP, Post-Plugin Library, Quick Reply Template Plugin, Random Posts, Redirection, Share This (jQuery), Smart Archives, Subscribe To Comments, Tabbed Widgets (mine), Thumbnails for Post Excerpts (mine, not public yet), Widget Context (mine, not released yet), WordPress.com Stats, WP-Ads, WP-Digg Style Paginator, WP-OAuth, WP-Syntax, WP Super Cache and XRDS-Simple.

This is what I call the amazing part of open-source and WordPress.

Related posts

1. WordPress Plugin: Custom Function Widgets
2. Fixing «PostPost» and «Ozh' Absolute Comments» Plugins
3. Tabbed Widgets Plugin for WordPress

Tabbed Widgets plugin

• 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.

Related posts

1. Tabbed Widgets Updated for WordPress 2.8
2. Tabbed Widgets Update: Version 1.3
3. Tabbed Widgets in the Wild

Related posts

1. Tabbed Widgets Updated for WordPress 2.8
2. Tabbed Widgets Now Better than Ever
3. Tabbed Widgets Update: Version 1.3

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:

Error (duplicate comment, or posting too quickly ?). Aborted

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: add_options_page() in /.../wp-content/plugins/postpost/postpost.php on line 88

Line 88 of postpost.php contains the following:

add_action('admin_head', 'wppp_add_options_page');

In all of my plugins I have used the admin_menu hook for adding plugin settings page, so the solution was simply to replace admin_head with admin_menu, like this:

add_action('admin_menu', 'wppp_add_options_page');

Download PostPost 1.3 which allows you to specify three rotating feed footers for posts that exceed certain number of letters.

Fixing the Reply Prefill backslash error in Ozh’ Absolute Comments (2.2)

Update: Ozh has updated the plugin (version 2.2.1) and it fixes the problem mentioned below. To get the latest version use the automatic plugin updater or download it from the WordPress Extend.

Reply Prefill is a really handy feature that automates the process of referring to the author of a comment you are replying to.

The default reply prefill looks like this: @%%name%%:... , but I wanted to include also a link to the original comment: <a href="%%link%%">%%name%%</a>, ...

However, after saving the settings, the new prefill contained added backslashes before the quotes: <a href=\"%%link%%\">%%name%%</a>, .... It was immediately clear that backslashes are added when the user input is sanitized before saving it to the database, and not removed when retrieved from the database.

The solution is to strip slashes before the output is presented to a user — open the _admin.php file located in /ozh-absolute-comments/includes/ folder, and replace

$prefill = $wp_ozh_cqr['prefill_reply']; (line 40)

with

$prefill = stripslashes($wp_ozh_cqr['prefill_reply']);

and that’s it — comment prefills look exactely like they should.

Related posts

1. Quick Reply Templates Plugin and WordPress 2.8
2. WordPress Plugins which I Use
3. OpenID Plugin and WordPress 2.8

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.

Here are the problems in detail with the suggested solutions:

Problem: “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page” error

Description: You follow the upgrade instructions supplied by the WordPress 2.5 which state:

1. Delete your old WP files, saving ones you’ve modified.
2. Upload the new files.
3. Point your browser to /wp-admin/upgrade.php
4. You wanted more, perhaps? That’s it!

After creating a backup of all the files, I deleted them from the server (including the wp-config.php one) and uploaded the new ones, and pointed browser to /wp-admin/upgrade.php to discover that it asks me to create a new wp-config.php file.

For some reason I decided that instead of creating a new file, it would be easier to upload the previous wp-config.php which I thought contains all the information necessary also for the WordPress 2.5. That seemed to help as I was able to continue the upgrade and all the update scripts run successfully.

However, after supplying the credentials for the log-in, I was greeted with the following error message:

After a few Google searches, it was clear that it had something to do with the user permissions and the way they were handled in this new version of WordPress. I also remembered reading about the SECRET_KEY which has been introduced in WordPress 2.5. It all lead to the idea of actually modifying and using the version of wp-config.php supplied with this new version of WordPress.

Problem: Yet Another Related Posts plugin returns “Fatal error: Call to undefined function merge_filters() in … includes.php on line 73″

Yet Another Related Posts is a very useful and smart plugin created by Michael Erlewine.

Due to the fact that this plugin uses a “dirty, dirty hack” to:

avoid a loop in apply_filters('the_content') > yarpp_default() > yarpp_related() > current_post_keywords() > apply_filters('the_content'). The code is straight up stolen from wp-includes/plugin.php and, with the exception of the single hack line below, should match what happens in plugin.php

In WordPress 2.5 the apply_filters() function found in plugin.php has changed a lot, therefore the altered version of this function in Yet Another Related Posts plugin should resemble these changes as well.

Although this plugin doesn’t offer widget support by default, I use it together with my Custom Function Widgets plugin and it works like a charm. And I am proud to say that Custom Function Widgets plugin didn’t require any changes at all — it just works.

Problem: Popularity Contest plugin returns “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error”

Description: This problem occurs only during a fresh installation/activation of the plugin or when it is reactivated after an update.

On a Sidenote

It may seem that these errors could be a significant obstacle for the not-so-savvy WordPress users to successfully upgrade their blogs. In reality, however, it should be emphasized that the rest (and the majority) of plugins didn’t have any problems at all. And it is very likely that most of the solutions are just one or two searches away (or close). There is even an official Plugin Compatibility list on WordPress Codex.

How about you?

Did you upgrade? If so, how did it go? If not, what are the reasons for not doing it yet?

Related posts

1. OpenID Plugin and WordPress 2.8
2. WordPress 2.8 bleeding-edge and WordPress_Module::_weak_escape()
3. Widget Context Update for WordPress 2.8