Categories
Package/plugin/module WordPress

Plugin: Recently Commented Posts

This plugin has been deprecated. There will not be any continued support for it. Comments to this post are also now closed. Please use my much more robust Customizable Post Listings plugin.

Name:
Recently Commented Posts
Author:
Scott Reilly
Version:
0.92
Last updated:
07 July 2004
Download:
Description:
Retrieve the last N most recently commented posts. Note this is different than saying “the posts with the N most recent comments.” Also, a sample, albeit possibly too-customized, use of the function is also included.

NOTE: This plugin has been officially deprecated in favor of the much more robust Customizable Post Listings plugin.

Categories
Package/plugin/module WordPress

Plugin: Get Custom Field Values

This plugin has been updated! Comments to this post are now closed. For the latest download, documentation, and link for posting new comments related to this plugin, visit the plugin’s new homepage at:
coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/get-custom-field-values
Name:
Get Custom Field Values
Author:
Scott Reilly
Version:
2.1
Last updated:
26 March 2005
Description:

Easily retrieve and control the display of any custom field values/meta data for posts, inside or outside “the loop”. The power of custom fields gives this plugin the potential to be dozens of plugins all rolled into one.

Categories
WordPress

WordPress formatting bugs

I came across a few formatting bugs in the course of creating the entry related to my first plugin. When I used Movable Type, I opted to not have MT do any formatting of my posts for me. While giving me complete control over the look and layout, it was a bit tedious to wrap each paragraph in <p> and </p>, using <br /> to denote end-lines and blank lines, etc. In using WordPress, I’ve allowed it to do some of the formatting, and I checked “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically.”

Such handling comes with a price. Here are a few samples which will trigger WordPress formatting bugs. The bugs involve at least the function balanceTags() in wp-includes/functions-formatting.php, and possibly others. At this point in time I haven’t gotten deep enough into this aspect of the WordPress code so I don’t have a solution to these particular problems, but I’ll document them in case someone else can fix them. (I’m not the first to encounter the worst of the items listed below, as evidenced by this bug tracker item.)

Categories
Package/plugin/module WordPress

Plugin: Text Replace

This plugin has been updated! Comments to this post are now closed. For the latest download, documentation, and link for posting new comments related to this plugin, visit the plugin’s new homepage at:
coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/text-replace
Name:
Text Replace
Author:
Scott Reilly
Version:
1.0
Last updated:
27 March 2005
Description:
Replace text with other text in posts, etc. Very handy to create shortcuts to commonly-typed and/or lengthy text/HTML, or for smilies.
Categories
Package/plugin/module WordPress

Plugin: wpPHPMailer

This plugin has been deprecated! It is no longer being developed and there will not be any continued support for it. Comments to this post are also now closed.

Fear not, for the essence of the plugin continues on in my Configure SMTP plugin.

Name:
wpPHPMailer
Author:
Scott Reilly
Version:
1.6
Last updated:
29 July 2005
Description:
Enable WordPress to send e-mail via SMTP instead of via PHP’s mail() function (aka sendmail).
Categories
Package/plugin/module WordPress

Plugin: wpuntexturize

This plugin has been updated! Comments to this post are now closed. For the latest download, documentation, and link for posting new comments related to this plugin, visit the plugin’s new homepage at:
coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/wpuntexturize
Name:
wpuntexturize
Author:
Scott Reilly
Version:
0.91
Last updated:
06 July 2004
Description:
A mini-plugin to undo some of the formatting performed by wptexturize().
Categories
WordPress

Formatting frustrations

Gah. I just spent a considerable amount of time doing the layout and formatting for the first plugin post, and I discovered a few frustrating aspects of WordPress’s formatting:

  1. When saving/publishing an entry that is in need of a closing tag, WordPress seeks to close it for you. Appreciated behavior, when it works properly. I’ve found that if a close tag is not present and WP inserts it for you, it is sometimes either (a) in the wrong spot (i.e. closes a mid-list <li> at the end of the <ol>/<ul> -or- (b) worse, it eats up some of the entry text in doing whatever it was doing. There is already a bug tracker item on this.
  2. If I had continued that lowercase sublist and put in a ( c) [without the space before the ‘c’, I would’ve wound up with a ©, which I wouldn’t have wanted. This is a result of wptexturize() (see next item)
  3. I was having a hell of a time figuring out why I was getting curly quotes for all single- and double-quote characters. Checking out the source of the page in my browser, I saw that single-quote characters were replaced with either &#8216; or &#8217;, and double-quote characters were replaced with &#8220; or &#8221;. This was when I discovered that wptexturize(), in /wp-includes/functions-formatting.php, was the culprit. As a result, I wrote a mini-plugin, wpuntexturize (the plugin is being pre-linked since I haven’t created the page for it yet as of this posting). The mini-plugin goes back and reverts some of wptexturize’s changes to what I had used originally. I could just as easily have commented out those four lines in the function and be done with it, as well as spared the processing of the replace and unreplace, but I’m currently of the mindset to limit modifications to the core files as much as possible.
Categories
Package/plugin/module WordPress

Plugin: Category Image(s)

This plugin has been updated! Comments to this post are now closed. For the latest download, documentation, and link for posting new comments related to this plugin, visit the plugin’s new homepage at:
coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/category-images
Name:
Category Image(s)
Author:
Scott Reilly
Version:
1.2
Last updated:
17 May 2005
Description:
Displays image for each category associated with a post. The number of images displayed can be limited, and the image file extension type and file location can specified.