vapourtrails.ca

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...)

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.