One of the things that strike people as somewhat limiting in the WordPress installation is the post list in the administration interface. Sure, you have the power to search the posts, but it lacks any kind of paging or category browsing options whatsoever. The hue and cry have resounded recently, so I decided to leverage some of my experience doing similar things for comments and make a plugin to provide some needed functionality. This is a sneak peak at that plugin as it currently exists for Posts. Note that I intend similar functionality for Pages.

Why am I doing a “sneak peek” instead of just releasing the damned things? Feedback. I want to hear from people what additional things I should put in to the plugin before it goes out the door. So, take a gander at this image (click on it for a full-size one).

That shows the paging options available. It’s identical to those available in the paged comment editing plugin so if you’ve seen that you know what to expect. See anything missing? How about this one.

That shows the level of browsing and searching support that’s available. Seem to fit the bill? Note that I don’t want to “cram everything but the kitchen sink” in there, so a suggestion to be able to browse by everything under the sun probably won’t be acted upon, but useful suggestions almost certainly will.

So, sling those suggestions into the comments if you would.

Most of my plugins received updates recently, so I figure I’d do a general announcement for those of you that use them.

Image Headlines

The Image Headlines plugin received a few updates one of which was a long-standing problem with bounding-box calculation, leading to text being cut off at the bottom. It’s recommended that, if you used a previous version of this plugin and upgrade to this version, you clear the image cache out following installation. Perhaps in the future I’ll have a button to clear that cache, but for now you’ll need to do it manually. Here’s the release notes for version 2.5:

• Corrected bounding box problems where the bottom parts of text would be cut off.
• Preview text is now handled more like what WordPress does for titles to more appropriately match what would actually appear.

Paged Comment Editing

My Paged Comment Editing plugin received a modest upgrade, with the biggest enhancement being new links for simple access to Previous and Next pages. Again, release notes for version 0.3:

• Enhancement to add ( « Previous | Next » ) links for easier navigation.
• Change to fix Windows host installs having problem with plugin installation.

Spelling Checker

The Spelling Checker plugin received a minor update to correct the placement of the “Check Spelling” button on the comment editing page.

Thanks

Again, thanks to all of you who use these plugins and provide useful feedback and encouragement. It is certainly appreciated.

I’m a person that’s usually constantly tweaking my WordPress install. It’s a hobby. There are few things that provide as immediate of a sense of accomplishment as getting some sort of tweak or hack or plugin working and working well. It’s a far cry from my day job which has as its most exciting element the possibility of seeing a packet go from A to B in the appropriate manner. Woohoo. As such, I’ve come up with yet another plugin to enhance certain aspects of the WordPress experience.

WordPress 1.5 has some reasonably powerful if simplistic comment spam combating measures based on blacklists. It’s surprisingly effective as long as you’re fairly proactive at keeping up with the blacklist. I was surprised one day to discover a slew of spam messages residing in the database. They weren’t displayed in my blog — though my customized asides plugin didn’t handle them perfectly and my comment counts were incorrect because they counted the spam comments which became my first clue that those comments were even in the database — and they weren’t visible in the admin interface. What the hell?

They’re there, you just can’t see them. They’ve been marked as spam by WordPress which is great. They probably are spam. But if you do happen to get a false-positive, you’ll never know about it unless you stumble across it like I did (yes, I had a couple of false positives and left some folks hanging). So, I came up with a plugin to let me see those comments if I choose, as well as provide some much-needed functionality to viewing comments in general.

Announcing the Paged Comment Editing plugin. No, doesn’t sound as fancy as the Image Headline plugin or even the Spell Checker plugin and your readers will reap no benefit, but it does have some merit for you, the WordPress author. This plugin overhauls the stock comment editing interface to provide the following capabilities:

• Finally page through all of your comments in the comment administration interface. The stock interface is limited to displaying the 20 most-recent comments. If you’re anything like me, you’ll burn through 20 in 2 days tops. You’ll now be free to read and edit every comment on your installation with ease. This plugin supports paging through your comments, including arbitrary numbers of posts per page as well as paging of comment searching.
• See the comments that can’t be seen. WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn added some reasonably powerful if simplistic comment spam combating measures based on blacklists. This is wonderful, but if a comment happens to be tagged as spam by WordPress you will never see it again unless you do it external to WordPress via phpMyAdmin or something like it. Therefore, you have no way of knowing if a comment was inappropriately marked as spam. This plugin makes those invisible comments visible again… but only when you want them. With appropriate blacklist in place, 99% of the things marked as spam will be spam and you certainly don’t want to sift through that all day. But it’s nice to be able to rescue that 1% that otherwise would have disappeared into the ether.

If you’re interested in including this functionality in your WordPress 1.5 installation, see this page for installation details.

Figured this one was big enough to announce on the front page. My Image Headlines plugin, which has seen a decent amount of popularity in a short time, has now been bumped up to version 2.4. Among the changes this time are:

• Reduced the memory footprint substantially during soft-shadow calculation so that users with hosting providers that specify memory limits on PHP can actually use the soft shadows without breaking their installation.
• A change to fix Windows pathnames in the cache_url folder.
• The final one, well, let me let this speak for itself:

Allow overriding of settings to display in other places aside from titles.

Yes, this means anywhere you want a nice, soft-shadowed image of arbitrary text, you can get it.

How do I accomplish this?!

Glad you asked! Click through to read how.

Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATED: Version 2.8 released 11/14/05. Download now!

NOTE: Please note that this plugin doesn’t support Wordpress 2.3. However, you can find a wonderful remake here that does.

Yay! After a lot of work, the new version of the Image Headline Plugin is available. This plugin was originally written by Joel Bennett but it’s come a long way since the beginning. New features in this version include:

• Excellent integration into the WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn administration interface.
• Gorgeous anti-aliased, soft shadows.
• Easier than ever to configure.

So, if you’re ready to take a gander, go on and tell me what you think. If you do end up using the plugin, please leave me a comment here with a link to your site so I can see the results! I’d love to see what you guys come up with.