Ludo announced the first beta for WPFF 1.0.0 a few weeks ago, and the second beta is now available. I finally found some free time to fix my test site and upgrade to the lastest & greatest.
The latest version is more polished since my last review and offers a few new features, including:
- Full search capabilities, complete with a custom template and a search term highlighter. Great job on this one, Ludo!
- Atom feeds and category-based feeds.
- Author pages.
- Basic comment formatting.
- Plus a bunch of small tweaks and bug fixes since the 0.99 betas.
I’ve just sent Ludo another small patch today that increases WPFF’s compatibility with WordPress. Hopefully the patch make it into the next beta, slated for release tomorrow. The changes are intended to allow you to use your existing .htaccess file generated by WordPress. I want to make sure that it’s easy to make the switch, so watch out for ports of popular WP plugins too.
I’ve spent the last few weeks importing my CD collection into iTunes. This is a big shift for me, and not just because of the size of my CD library (over 300 at last count). I’ve always insisted on the fidelity of CD audio versus MP3’s and resisted doing this for a long time. After all, why bother listening to an MP3 when you could just pop in the original CD?
But that’s the problem right there: as easy as it sounds, changing CD’s is a lot of effort (not to mention a big distraction) especially when trying to select out of such a large catalog. Since the switch, I now have a constant stream of music playing — my own personalized radio station — and I listen to a lot of stuff that just used to collect dust. I’ve kept the sampling rate fairly high but I still notice the difference on tracks with big dynamic ranges.
iTunes is a pretty slick piece of software. I like the smart playlists and the way “Party Shuffle” queues up tracks both before and after. Now I just have to rate the 2900 tracks imported so far to play favourite tracks more often and obscure stuff only every other month…
Just a quick note to announce the latest release of the “Jerome’s Keywords” plugin for WordPress 1.5. The new version fixes a few (minor) bugs and adds some requested features. The coolest part is that I’ve hooked it into WordPress’ rewrite rules code, which means that .htaccess rules can be updated automatically. This also fixes problems seen when using the index.php/%blah% style of permalinks.
The short list:
- Improved permalink handling for tag searches.
- Automatic
.htaccess rule generation.
the_keywords() now accepts parameters for formatting if you want to get fancy.- Fixed XHTML validation bug and handling of tags containing forward slashes (
/ ).
- Temporary workaround for conflicts with the mini-posts plugin.
Thanks to everyone who sent me feedback, found bugs and suggested new features. Keep ‘em coming! The only request that didn’t make this release was adding an options page — I’m still not decided on that one. Also, a special award for bravery goes to Dave Metzener for beta testing the new permalink/rewrite code.
At the prodding of “rg”, I’ve updated my keywords plugin to improve keyword searches. Previously, post keywords — or tags — were simply linked to the WordPress search function. This is fine if your tags show up in the body of your post, but for photos and other odd content this isn’t necessarily the case. So now the plugin creates its own search results from posts that use similar tags. The results page can even use its own template if you’re so inclined.
I always wanted it to work this way but hadn’t sorted out all of the WordPress filters/actions to make it happen until now. You can give the plugin a try on this site, or download it and try it on your own. Get tagging!
Since I released my PreFormatted plugin the other day, I figured it was time to polish up my other active plugins and offer them for download. Plus it gave me an excuse to put together a WordPress plugins page. I’m working (or planning) on a few other plugins for WPFF so this will be a good home for them too.
Here they are:
- Keywords — A cross between a
<meta name="keyword"> tag plugin and a Technorati tags plugin, this lets you enter keywords for every post for searching and more! Learn more
- Page Date — Simple plugin to update a page’s timestamp every time it’s modified (you can do this manually for posts, but not pages). Learn more
I’ll probably try to get these hosted in the WordPress Plugin DB or the official WordPress plug-in repository, but wouldn’t you rather get them from the source?