Things were just going too smoothly. I thought my SK2 plugin was doing dandy, catching everything it was supposed to. And it was, though my average daily take has been hovering about 5 or 10 now. What should have been obvious was that I actually haven’t received any comments recently. I finally discovered why: there was a domain blacklist that had a domain of, simply, “2006″. Due to the way the plugin handles domain blacklist denials, any attempted comment on any post that happened to be posted in the year 2006 would get denied. That’s what we refer to in the software industry as a “head slapper.” Well, that’s the most censored possibility of many.

I’ll have to redesign some things. mod_security should be able to squirrel me out of this, as it allows you to check particular fields within query strings, so I should be able to look at just the URL and actual comment text instead of the entire argument list.

The worst part of this is that the only way I found out was following a referral back to a forum post where some poor fellow mentioned that he was unable to post a comment. “Horseshit,” said I and decided to post a test comment. I got denied. Head slap. Sorry ava11 and whoever else.

I’ve made a minor update to my Enhanced Views plugin today. This one goes to great lengths to reduce the amount of memory used by the plugin to try to correct an issue with it running out of memory when there are a lot of WordPress categories in use. If you had no problems before, it’s likely you don’t need this update. However, you’re welcome to use it as it may be a hair faster due to decreased size.

Since I so rarely update my plugins any more — and please don’t ask me about the core code contribution for the paged posts and comments functionality — when I do update one of them it is cause for awe and celebration. Such is the case for the update I’ve released for the Image Headlines plugin. Many people have asked for the ability to clear out the cache of images that the plugin creates so I’ve gone ahead and done just that. Here’s the relevant section from the plugin documentation:

Image Caching

You have control over how long the plugin will store images in the image cache. Why does the plugin cache images instead of generating them on-the-fly every time? Because it takes work to generate those images… sometimes — especially when using those pretty soft-shadows — a lot of work. Asking the web server to generate those images from scratch every time is burdensome. So, the plugin saves the image upon creation. The next time that particular title is displayed the web server can simply return that previously-created image and save a lot of work.

There’s a trade-off though, of course. Storage. Those images take up space. And if you have, say, 600 posts, that’s 600 images that would be stored. The plugin lets you decide how long to keep those images in the cache based on the age of the image. The default is 14 days, meaning that any image that was created 14 days ago will be deleted sometime today. This simply means that if someone views an archive post from, say, last year it is likely that the plugin will need to recreate the image before it can be displayed. Once created it will hang around in the cache for the configured time and then get deleted again. You can select any number of days to suit your needs. Please note that all of this caching and the management of the image files within the cache is transparent to you and to your readers.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR WORDPRESS 2.0 USERS: This plugin doesn’t work under WordPress 2.0. I honestly do not know that it ever will, but I won’t say “never.” As you can tell, I haven’t upgraded to 2.0 myself. When and if that happens and I reach the same point of frustration with the limitations of the post viewing interface in that version, I may have the impetus to update it. Sorry for any inconvenience.

At long last, it’s finally ready for an initial release. Announcing the Enhanced Views plugin for WordPress. This plugin replaces the original Posts functionality in the WordPress administration interface with a new version that include increased functionality, including:

• Paging through posts with easy-to-use Next and Previous page links as well as links to individual page numbers.
• Easily selectable number of posts per page.
• Browsing by Category, Author, and Date.
• Sorting by selectable columns.

If you want it, go get it.

The last time we saw the Enhanced View Plugin I mentioned that I had changed direction and was trying to get back to the functionality I had. Though with all the stuff going on I haven’t had a ton of time to work on the plugin, I have made some progress over some late nights. So, here’s where we stand now.

• The Posts functionality is done. You can see a screenshot of the current goods above (click for a larger version). Note that I’m now taking over the “Posts” functionality like I did for comments. A few new things are there from last time, notably the “Author” dropdown and the availability of changing the ordering. Unfortunately I can only order by date, title, and author when I take over the “Posts” menu just because of the limitations of doing it that way: it uses the standard WP posts queries and those are the only fields you can technically order by. I thought I could circumvent that to allow ordering by post ID through judicious use of filters on the query strings, but the one thing that’s hardcoded is the ORDER BY MySQL parameter… it has to be a field with a name that starts with “post_”, and the post ID is simply called “ID”. Oh well.
• I’ve only just begun on the “Pages” functionality, but it should be an easier task since I don’t have to jump through all the goofy Javascript hoops and I can make it do whatever I want. So, expect full control over order in that one.
• I said that I hoped that I could roll a new version of the Paged Comment Editing plugin into this plugin for a glorious trifecta of paged editing goodness. After much gnashing of teeth and cursing it ain’t going to happen. The plugin architecture as it stands cannot support a single plugin owning more than one submenu of any menu. It works for “Posts” and “Pages” because they’re handled fundamentally differently, but trying to also get “Comments” taken over is a frank impossibility.

I think — barring any additional pains with my daughter — that I should be able to get this thing out this week.