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Category Archives: Wordpress Plugins
Be Careful of the Autoupgrade Feature in WordPress
As many of you who’ve upgraded to the new WordPress 2.5 version have maybe noticed there is an option on the Plugins page which basically suggests that you can auto-upgrade a plugin. I would strongly suggest you do NOT use this function right now. First off, this is not a feature that is directly supported by plugin authors, it is a function that works outside of the plugin. So if something goes wrong there may be no way for any plugin author to help you fix the situation since the plugin itself did not do the action. Secondly it’s been acknowledged that this feature is really not very robust yet and may very well fail and hose your entire WordPress insall.
I would strongly suggest that you continue to download all plugins yourself and upload them to the server. In the case of AWSOM.org plugins they all upgrade themselves properly when you reactivate them, so it’s actually not really more difficult anyway.
UPDATED: AWSOM News Visual Editor Test File Available
I have a test file now available for the AWSOM News Announcement plugin that I hope starts to fix the major issues present in the Visual Editor in WordPress 2.5.1. The files are available at http://www.awsom.org/filerepository/awsomnewstinymcefix.zip . Simply unzip the folder and replace the files on your server with the ones in the zip file. This file does not fix the weird name problem (where the image popup window has only variable names displayed), but I think it fixes the major issue of changing absolute links to relative ones, which was breaking adding images using the add image function. The editor now looks more like the Post/Page version.
Please email me or comment here or at Harknell.com and let me know if the new file helps the situation.
UPDATE:I’ve decided to skip the idea of integrating with the built in WordPress tinyMCE and now have packaged a version of the Visual Editor directly into the AWSOM News plugin. Right now this is a test so literally every possible function is enabled. I can’t guarantee everything works in this test version though, so it’s for people who really need to use the Visual Editor and want to try out something immediately to see if it will work for them now. I’ll package up a formal update soon.
Visual Editor Issues in AWSOM News and Pixgallery
The Visual Editor function in the current versions of AWSOM News Announcement and AWSOM Pixgallery do not function entirely properly with WordPress 2.5.1. The new version of WordPress added in a new version of tinyMCE (updated from 2.x to 3.x) and as a result broke the code that I use to add the editor to my plugins. The Visual Editor still works fine for versions of WordPress previous to 2.5.1, but I’m working to get it to work properly in the current version. The most obvious issues are with missing language text for some of the functions, and improper relative URL paths being created when attempting to add images using the editor. Keep checking back and I hope to get this fixed soon.
First AWSOM Pixgallery Video Tutorial Now Available
The first AWSOM plugin video tutorial, titled ‘Create Your First AWSOM Pixgallery Image Gallery Page‘, is now available at the AWSOM.org website. This first tutorial is for the AWSOM Pixgallery plugin for WordPress and is designed to show you how to set up your first image gallery in just a few minutes.
I plan on adding new tutorials over time to detail out all of the different capabilities of this plugin as well as others in the AWSOM series. Upcoming tutorials will feature how to use the FastFlow method of setting up your AWSOM Pixgallery image/gallery captions as well as details on how the different settings in Pixgallery affect your gallery look and feel.
Please feel free to contact me or leave comments if you have specific ideas for tutorials you’d like to see. I’m also considering creating regular WordPress video tutorials which would go through the core areas of WordPress set up and usage.
Language Display issues in WordPress
I’ve had a few reports come in that people using the AWSOM News Announcement plugin or Pixgallery have been having some issues displaying different language types, most notably Asian or other non-English based character sets. The fix for these issues with AWSOM plugins, or any other plugins displaying this phenomenon, is within the WordPress database. When a database is set up in MySQL one of the things you can assign to it is the language encoding type. In addition, all of it’s fields and tables can also be assigned a language encoding type. By default MySQL utilizes Swedish as it’s encoding type (MySQL was developed in Sweden). WordPress typically tries to set up it’s database as UTF-8. In some cases this doesn’t work right, especially if the admin has updated their version of WordPress continually from a version previous to WordPress 2.1.x where this wasn’t defined.
So, the fix is to go to the database directly though phpmyadmin or another database editor and change the language type for the affected Tables and fields to the language type that you need to display. For AWSOM plugins it’s pretty obvious which tables are for what plugin by their name (I make great pains to place the plugin name as the table name)
In extreme cases you can contact me to help you out, but the best bet is to do a google search for how to use phpmyadmin.