New Plugin & Slow Support

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!

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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.

Download Popularity Contest for WP 2.7 Version 1.3b
Popularity Contest for WP 2.7 (2256) - 12.92 KB
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WP Smart Sort v2 Released

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!!!

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Smart Sort Premium Development Update

smart-sort-logoProgress 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. 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.

  1. 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.
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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)

Smart Sort Top level Menu (WP 2.7b3)

Sort Drop down Menu options

Sort Drop down Menu options

Smart Sort Index Table Setup

Smart Sort Index Table Setup

User Drop Down Menu to select post sort direction

User Drop Down Menu to select post sort direction

–Dyasonhat–

Split large xml sitemaps PHP script

Many people will be familiar with the popular Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress I use it on all of my wordpress installs and have been very happy with it. Until about a month ago when I was installing it over at accommodationsphere.com and it created a sitemap for me nicely gzipped and weighing in at only 1-2mbs but a whopping 92,000 urls.

Does google accept sitemaps with that many files? Not unless they’re split across multiple sitemaps which contain less than 50,000 urls each and utilize a sitemap index file.

So I organized a nice little php script that I’ve got loaded in a cron job that runs to split that large sitemap.xml.gz file into smaller .xml.gz files and creates an index file.

It’s a little crude but I’m hoping to get this included as a feature in the above mentioned plugin rather than expanding on this little scripts abilities outright.

You’re free to use it, modify it and do what ever, but be nice; if you develop a bit of extra features or usability for it why not send me the code for inclusion in the next version.

Download PHP XML Sitemap Splitter Version 1.0

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SmartSort v2.0 coming soon

FINAL UPDATE: The official page for WP Smart Sort has moved here.

UPDATE: After eagerly anticipating that this script would have been released by now; I’ve come across issues with the extensiveness of the SQL joins the script has been using, in a similar way to smart sort v1. All along I’ve wanted to avoid ‘adding’ or modifying WP in any way but in order for the script to work as I want I’m forced to utilize an “index” table with fields created during script setup in order for this script to have the type of functionality its meant to.

Final version should be released in December. Thanks to those who have left words of encouragement, smart sort v2 is on it way yet!

Thought I’d wet a few people apetites and annouce that I have an ALL new version of smart sort on its way. ETA should be in around a month but might release beta versions before then for testing and comments.

Some of the new features include:

  • Display a drop down menu on category & search pages similar to the ’sort by’ box that is used on YouTube.
  • Additional drop down list allowing the user the option of choosing how many posts per page they want to view.
  • Utilize WP’s built in sort by hooks. The reason for this is to make it as compatable with other plugins as possible.
  • Option to sort by any detected fields in the wp_posts table. (this allows for a modified posts table)
  • Option to sort by any custom fields.
  • Cacheable friendly

I’d like to keep the plugin free but its costing quite a bit this time to get it right so I might need to make it “donationware” but I’ll see closer to the time.

– Dyasonhat —

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TDO tag fixes with a twist

thedeadoneFor those who are not familiar with TDO tag fixes, its a fantastic plugin that makes up for alot of wordpress’s shortfalls in what i like to call ‘filtering’ posts. It basically allows you specify exactly what posts you want shown based on category and tag. If you were reading here a few weeks ago you would have seen me playing around with the plugin a bit and creating some random posts in the process.

What I discovered was a minor flaw in the plugin that TDO hadn’t picked up on, the new version has now been released and it’s brilliant I modded it a bit for the accommodation site to include check boxes and as far a I’m concerned the plugin is worthy of ‘core’ integration *gasp*

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FINAL UPDATE: The official page for WP Smart Sort has moved here.

This plugin allows you to place a sort bar, with options to sort the list of posts by any custom field. You can place the sort bar above or below a list of posts in a category or archive or anywhere in your template.

Simple place <?php placesort() ?> anywhere in your template.

Options are set in the admin panel as to which custom fields to display in the sort bar.

This was originally coded by smartalien on scriptlance. He no longer develops it and I purchased the code from him. It works but I put it out there to be used and improved by the wordpress community.

There may be bugs; if you can’t fix them point them out, if you can send us the code fix.

This project is hosted with Google Code here

Latest Version 1.0:

Download Smart Sort Version 1.o

Enjoy it.

To Do list:

  • More pretty permalink URL
  • CSS/HTML output options to customize display of sort bar
  • Fix compatability with other plugins
  • Display on main index page (currently only seems to be displaying on category and archive pages
  • Tagging support

Version History:

1.0

  • First Release
  • A bit “buggey” but it works
  • Waiting feedback on requests, issues and ideas
  • Planned rapid deployment of 1.1 to tackle known bugs
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