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.
(more...)
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!
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.
I’ve just released the newest version of my keywords plugin. This minor release includes two new features that I find very useful:
- Suggested keywords - A list of your eight most popular keywords will show up below the keywords field. Each time you save, they will update to reflect words used in the post. The algorithm used is very simple but should help you to remember other relevant keywords that you’ve used in the past.
- Natural sort for tag cosmos - By popular demand, the tag cosmos now uses a case-insensitive natural sort order. What does this mean? Upper- and lower-case keywords are no longer separated and the “natural sort” will put values like “9km” ahead of “10km”.
Enjoy!
Ok, I think everything is sorted out after the switch to LightPress. Comments are working properly again, feeds are fixed (despite my best efforts to break them over the last few days) and I think all of the permalink & style issues have been sorted out.
I can’t blame this on LightPress, the 1.0.0 release is solid and works fine if you don’t tinker with the code. But I’m constantly trying to “improve” things and as a result I’ve been busy fixing my own bugs! I’m happy to report that my tags/keywords plugin for LightPress is working very nicely now — if you wondered why my feeds were scrambled, this was the culprit. It’s not ready for general release just yet, but soon I hope.
Rest assured that if you’re using any of my WordPress plugins, they’ll continue to be supported. After all, they’re still running “behind the scenes” on this site, even if LightPress is handling page rendering.
Things that have been removed during the switch:
- Comment thread feeds — this isn’t supported in LightPress yet, but I’ve added it to the list.
- RSS 0.91 feeds — there’s a limit to how many old formats can/should be supported. I’d recommend switching to the Atom feed, if only for it’s support of relative URI’s.
LightPress 1.0 was released earlier this week and I finally made the switch. I’m really hoping that I haven’t missed anything in the transition — the initial conversion was simple but my test site diverged from my WordPress site several times in the past. If any parts of this site seem broken, please let me know!
I’m much happier with my LightPress templates, they’re much cleaner to work with. I’ve also written a bunch of LightPress plugins — including a new version of Jerome’s Keywords — and they took about 1/4 of the effort of the WordPress versions. I think that’s a pretty good trade. I’ll post the new plugins as soon as I can, along with a quick conversion guide. Ludo has received permission to convert Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick theme so look for that to appear shortly, too.
Comments are the only thing not working properly at the moment. All of my test comments have gone straight to moderation. It could be a Spaminator problem (bundled with LightPress) but it’s more likely a bone-headed configuration error on my part since they seem to work fine on all of the other LightPress sites, including both of my test sites. More to come…
I’ve just released a new version my keywords plugin for WordPress. Jerome’s Keywords version 1.5 finalizes the new tag cosmos and most-used keywords list functionality. Some minor bugs and annoyances have been fixed along the way too.
By far the most time-consuming part was revising the documentation. The plugin page now includes more “how-to” information and includes most of the tips and sample files scattered throughout earlier comment threads. Drop by the plugin page and check it out.
Known Issues & Future Plans
- The duplicate keywords issue reported by theanomaly has yet to be resolved (or duplicated).
- Add a “relevant posts” feature that returns posts with a high number of similar keywords.
- Enhance the edit page to suggest relevant keywords used in the past.
- Automatically parse post links tagged with “rel” and add their tag to the keyword list.
My host moved this site to a new server the other day, so hopefully everything made it over in one piece. It was amusing to get e-mails about new comments being posted despite the fact that I couldn’t access the new server myself (DNS issue with my ISP). So if I haven’t responded to your e-mail or your comment has disappeared, please let me know.
PreFormatted 1.0 Released
The newest PreFormatted release is now online and includes some minor fixes. Specifically, a few filters had to be tweaked due to changes in the official Strayhorn release. I also added a fix for a common WordPress problem: wpautop() likes to place your <!--more--> and <!--nextpage--> tags into their own paragraph blocks. This produces invalid XHTML when your post gets split into multiple pages. PreFormatted will remove the offending tags when possible.
I have many features planned for the next release, including keeping a copy of posts in their original format. I’ve been using Markdown lately (on another project) so expect PreFormatted to play nicer with other formatting plugins — my strategy should allow it to detect which filters need to re-arranged automatically.
Jerome’s Keywords — Roadmap
Thanks again to everyone who has sent me feedback about this plugin. As mentioned in a previous comment thread, there is an alpha of version 1.5 that can be used to create a tag cosmos. I plan to release 1.5-final in the next few days, which will add a “top X” (insert your number here) keyword list and will fix the way category meta keywords are handled.
I suspect that the new features of 1.5 won’t scale very well for heavily used sites, so the next major release (2.0) will move to a different storage scheme. Don’t worry, the conversion will be painless and completelybehind the scenes. The plan also calls for an options page for easier customization.