I’ve just finished working on a great project with the people over at thecfoconnection.com

My involvment included, CSS Design, plugin customization, migration over to a new server and platform. The site is run on a WordPress Platform.

Previously the site was based on HTML static pages and as a result I utilised WordPress’s permalink options with the HTML pages plugin to ensure existing pages within google’s index are still found.

Additionally we set up redirects for other pages indexed by google that no longer had any direct relevant pages on the new site.

As many WordPress fans are aware the plugin competition over at weblogtoolscollection.com is underway, each year I’ve watched the competition come and go and have been thrilled at whats come out of it.

Well this year I’ve decided to enter, I’ve had a plugin in mind for nearly a year now that I haven’t had the guts to actually tackle, it’s actually a plugin I wonder why no one else hasn’t done. Any way I’ve spend the last month planning it, looking at various open source libraries to incorporate and generally just learning more on the subject that will make this plugin fly.

I’m not anouncing just yet what it’s going to be, I’ll at least what untill I have more than just the install class written (yay! that parts’s done). I’m confident that this could be a competition finalist if I stick at it and incorporate all the features I want to, so currently I have a lot of enthusiasm.

The downside is, as many of the users of my other plugins have already found out is that the support for the other plugins is a little slow at the moment, still going, but slow. Sorry to all those who are wanting quick fixes etc, I’m trying to get to them but since the competition ends July 31st and I’m trying to code something that an entire team should be doing you’ll hopefully forgive me my human trait of a need for sleep.

Cheers!

Been doing a fair bit of work for Todd over at Whatsthesoup.net, It’s a fantastic example of niche blogging making a big success of itself.

The site allows restaurants across the US to update their soup menu online so soup fans anywhere can easily choose where to go for the soup that suits their mood.

I’ve been involved with:

• Home page re-design.
• Writing the AJAX category dropdown plugin for this purpose
• Bug fixing
  • WP Geo wasn’t playing nice with Rolescoper
  • Blog within a sub directory of another blog
  • Mobile blog site
• Tweaking the mobile theme, adding additional functions for categories and sub categories
• Other minor tweaks.

It’s been great working them and since they’re launching their national campaign soon, here’s wishing all the souper (excuse the pun) guys over at Whatsthesoup.net good luck with the expansion.

Hi all,

I finally released my  Ajax Category Dropdown plugin yesterday, it’s hosted over at the WordPress Extend site.

For more about the plugin view the plugin page.

Queries, bug and fixes should be done over at the forums.

Cheers

DyasonHat!

There no doubt that Alex King’s Popularity Contest plugin is, excuse the pun, one WordPress’s most popular plugin ever. But Alex seems to be a bit to busy to maintain the plugin (?2007 being the last update) and there is a plethora of users out there asking about patches, fixes, new version etc.

I’m not sure when exactly the plugin stopped working and which ‘branch’ versions are the best, but last week I came across this version and it’s working great on one of my WP 2.7 installs so I’m including it here for those that are struggling to find a version that works.

It’s a week earlier than expected but things came together really well in the end, I’ve really enjoyed writing this plugin and hope that users really benefit from it. View all the bumf over the plugin’s official page.

It is official the long awaited v2 of this great plugin is now available at the Wordpress.org repository for download.

OFFICIAL Plugin Page on Dyasonhat

It was previously planned that this plugin might not feature sorting posts by custom fields but I’m glad to say that this functionality has been retained in this version and is better than ever.

Thank you to all those who offered words of encouragement during the process and the patience for it’s LONG arrival.

Enjoy sorting your posts by ANY field you like!!!

Progress on our smart sort plugin is currently on target for release in next couple of weeks.

A decision has been made to release 2 versions of the plugin

1. 1. Free Version

   Will enable sorting of posts only
   Sorting will only be available on fields from the wp_posts table
   This essentially mean that sorting by: title, date added, date modified and comment count will be available.

2. Premium version
   • Full set of features including sort/filter/search
   • Once off price of $35
   • …full feature list available soon.

A Demo of the plugin in action can now be seen over at http://wpsmartsort.dyasonhat.com/

Remaining Development

• User customization of forms
• Search form
• Plugin API functions for advanced implementation.

Edit: 10 Dec 2008. Changed select term_taxonomy_id to term_id.

There are many times when developing a plugin that I’ve wanted to easily get the url of the current context eg. if I’m in a category page I want the url of that page, and the same for tags archives etc.

The following function does this quite nicely.

</code>

function get_current_context_url(){
global $wp_query;
global $wpdb;

$url = '';
if (is_category()) {
$cat_id = $wp_query->query_vars['cat'];
$url = get_category_link($cat_id);
}
elseif (is_tag()) {
$tag_name = $wp_query->query_vars['tag'];
$tag_id = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT ".$wpdb->terms.".term_id FROM $wpdb->term_taxonomy
LEFT JOIN $wpdb->terms
ON (".$wpdb->term_taxonomy.".term_id = ".$wpdb->terms.".term_id)
WHERE ".$wpdb->terms.".slug = '$tag_name'
AND ".$wpdb->term_taxonomy.".taxonomy = 'post_tag'
LIMIT 1");
$url = get_tag_link($tag_id);
}
elseif (is_author()) {
$author_id = $wp_query->query_vars['author'];
$url = get_author_posts_url($author_id);
}
elseif (is_date()) {
$year = $wp_query->query_vars['year'];
$month = $wp_query->query_vars['monthnum'];
$day = $wp_query->query_vars['day'];

if ($wp_query->query_vars['day']) {
$url = get_day_link( $year,  $month,  $day);
}
elseif ($wp_query->query_vars['monthnum']) {
$url = get_month_link( $year,  $month,  $day);
}
elseif ($wp_query->query_vars['year']) {
$url = get_year_link( $year,  $month,  $day);
}
}
else {
$url = get_bloginfo('url');
}

//ensure trailing slash
if ("/" != substr($url, -1)) {
$url = $url . "/";
}
return $url;
}

<code>

Hi all,

A Lot of people have been asking if there really is going to be a smart sort V2 the short answer is, YES!

I’m current putting in close to 16 hours a day on the new version of the plugin and it’s coming along nicely. I thought I’d release a few screen shots to show some of what we’re doing.

Once complete the plugin will feature 3 functions:

• Sorting posts on Category, Tag, Archive and Search pages
• Filtering posts based on user criteria on the above pages
• Allow for creation of advanced search form

Why all 3? Why not just sort. The reason is that in order for the sort to work how I wanted I have to create an index table for WordPress and this means more possibilities that I really want to make the most of. I’ve considered releasing separate plugins for this, but since it seems I’m not going to release this as open source ;-( but rather for a small fee I figure the complete package will be quite a draw card for many WP developers.

Smart Sort Top level Menu (WP 2.7b3)

Sort Drop down Menu options

Smart Sort Index Table Setup

User Drop Down Menu to select post sort direction

–Dyasonhat–