One of the first plugins I wanted to write for WordPress was a decent spam filter. At the time (late 2004) there were several plugins already out there, but they were all rules-based and I wanted something more adaptive. So I wrote a few simpler plugins for practice and soon abandoned the idea, since I really didn’t get much spam — or even many comments for that matter.
After a seven month absence, I came back here to find over 4000 comments in moderation, most of it spam. It took a week to sort through and clean that mess up, all to preserve the 5% of legitimate comments buried in there. Then after a 2 week vacation, I was stunned to see my empty moderation queue back up to 2700 comments. No rest for the wicked, I guess.
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UPDATE 27-Aug-2006: The table creation bug in the first beta has been fixed, thanks to the keen eye of Francesco Ferrucci. My apologies for including such an obvious bug, and for my 2 week absence (I’ve been on vacation).
UPDATE 4-Sep-2006: Some minor changes (now at beta3) for compatibility with MySQL 3.23, Semiologic and Chip’s tag cloud widget.
So over the past week, I’ve been working towards my promise (made only a scant 7+ months ago) of delivering a 2.0 version of “Jerome’s Keywords”. I’m glad to announce that most of the rewriting and debugging are done so there’s a beta of the 2.0 version for you to try out.
Before you do, a few caveats:
- It’s strictly WordPress 2.0+, older versions of WP aren’t supported.
- Tags are now stored in a dedicated table for performance reasons, so you need “create table” access on your database.
What’s new:
- Fixes a whole bunch of minor bugs introduced by WP2.0 (suggested keywords, including categories, etc.).
- Adds tag management features from LightPress.
- Adds an option page to make tag display setup easier.
- Including meta keywords in your header is now a one-click option; no template code required.
- Nicer template tag functions for posts and tag clouds (and no parameters required if you use the option page).
- Random tag cloud sort feature.
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I just finished a quick update to the Jerome’s Keywords to add compatibility for WordPress 2.0. Thanks to everyone who sent in reminders & suggestions, and a big thank-you to Horst Gutmann whose patch is the basis for this update.
Not much else has changed, except the ability to hide suggested keywords — but why would you want to? So you can stick with the 1.7/1.8 version of the plugin unless you have a burning need to upgrade to buggy WP2.0.
A serious update to this plugin is in the works which will build on the tagging system I wrote for LightPress. Tag management, an option page and the ability to import tags from other plugins (so you can switch back from UTW). It’s going to be great!
If you’ve ever visited before, you should immediately notice the new layout. I’ve been planning to rearrange this for some time and I’m very glad that it’s done. There are still a few rough spots here and there (and I have yet to test this in IE) but the wrinkles will get smoothed out shortly.
What’s new:
Moved to TextDrive, who have graciously extended hosting to the LightPress project. These guys are great and I’ve never seen a hosting environment so free of restrictions. It makes my life a lot easier since I can actually do stuff when I log in.
Upgraded to the latest version of LightPress (1.1.0-rc1). The upgrade was simple and I just had to update a few tags & template filenames that have changed since version 1.0. The new design would not be possible without the upgrade and would have been a PHP monstrosity in WordPress.
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Between bouts of testing LightPress and customizing a fork of the WordPress admin interface, I found some time to work on that old favourite, Jerome’s Keywords. The latest version of this keywords + tagging plugin features some bug fixes and a few tweaks:
- Fixed the nefarious uksort() bug (which should never have seen the light of day)
- Fixed a minor bug in the tag cosmos scaling
- The local keyword search now includes results for tagged pages
- You can now generate Flickr- and del.icio.us-style links in your cosmos or top-X lists by using
%flickr% and %delicious% respectively. I’ll post an example shortly on the cosmos howto page.
Thanks to everyone who provided feedback about the above, especially to Denis de Bernardy who suggested fixes to the first three items.
After finishing this update, I think it’s time for some serious refactoring of the plugin code. It has grown very organically — perhaps too much even — thanks to all of the suggestions I’ve received. The time is right to finally add an administration page. I’d like to aim for simpler WP template tags, with most of the customization done within the admin interface. If you’re lucky, maybe you won’t have to use any template tags at all. mailliw has also sent me some intriguing ideas that would really push the tagging aspect to a new level. The next update should be a big one (barring any new bugs), so please hold tight.