Archive For August, 2008

vbDrupal is a fork from the Drupal CMS which integrates Drupal with the vBulletin forum software. All third party modules and themes for Drupal…

Hi,

No, not a wiki product by the phpBB Group. I am pleased to announce the addition of a wiki for syndicating code documentation and content at http://wiki.phpbb.com/.

This wiki is a place where you can share your experience with the codebase of phpBB3. Anything related to code documentation, modding/styling tutorials can be added there. Please note that we currently only allow registered users to edit/add pages.

What it is not

The wiki is not meant to be a general documentation of how to use phpBB3. It doesn’t describe how to register, post new topics, etc. - this can still be found within our user documentation.

The MOD Documentation available at phpbb.com will be slowly moved to the wiki over the next weeks.

The phpBB Teams.

Please help me to welcome Mattimus as our newest staff member here! Mattimus has been very helpful on the site and has graciously accepted my offer to become staff. I appreciate you Matt and I know others here appreciate your help as well!

Extended Categories Widget

A replacement of the category widget to allow for greater customization of the category widget.

Protected Post Password Hint

Traditionally all password protected posts contain a boiler-plate password form without any hints. Without any capability to change the string, one must provide the hint in another post, which is a bit clumsy. Not to mention, people viewing the single protected post only will be unable to see the hint at all. With this plugin protected posts are more usable.

Babel

It allows you to write your blog in multiple languages, and switch between these with a simple click on a flag.

No Href in Comment Author

Disable HREF URL linking in the comment author of your WordPress posts

Lijit Search

The Lijit search ‘wijit’ allows your visitors to search through not only your blog content, but also your extended social network.

WordPress Flag Comments

Allows readers to flag WordPress comments as inappropriate and then allow an administrator control on how to handle that.

Daily Top 10 Posts

Track the hits of each blog post for the current day and cumulatively at the same time.

Broken Links Remover

Automatically remove the bad and broken links from the view of human visitors and search engine robots.

@reply \w comment preview

This plugin allows you to add Twitter-like @reply links to comments, including a preview of the comment replied to.

I have updated the logo area graphics for you / the old ones are still available.

Go here to grab the old and new graphic files
http://www.extremepixels.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5384

It looks like there’s going to be another point-release of WordPress coming soon. WordPress version 2.6.2-beta1 was just branded in svn a short while ago. Looking over the logs, I don’t see anything major — a fix for the Textpattern importer, a bug fix that prevents an attempt to make a revision of a revision, a new ‘login_redirect’ filter, a new ‘wp_rand()’ function, and a handful of other minor bugfixes.

I’m kind of wondering if there’s something bigger that’s going to be added before release…

IP.Board 2.2.x and 2.3.x Security Patch

We have released a single-file security patch which impacts IP.Board 2.2.x and 2.3.x versions. This is a critical update. Please apply the patch as soon as possible or contact our technical support via the client area if you need assistance.

Issue

It is possible to perform a remote SQL exploit and inject SQL code in an existing IPB query.

Patching Your Board

If you have downloaded your IP.Board after the time of this announcement, the patch is already included in your files. To patch an existing installation, simply download the attached file and overwrite: sources/action_public/xmlout.php

http://forums.invisionpower.com/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=17192

vbDrupal is a fork from the Drupal CMS which integrates Drupal with the vBulletin forum software. All third party modules and themes for Drupal…

Well there are two links that showcase 11 and 10 fixes and hacks respectively.

Most Desired WordPress Hacks: 11 Common Requests and Fixes: Noupe lists 11 commonly requested WordPress hacks and elegant fixes for them. They include avoiding duplicate content, having category specific menus, sidebar login boxes, most wanted categories etc.

10 WordPress Hacks to make Your Life Easy: Jai lists another 10 hacks to play with. His hack tutorials include adding gravatars to comments, Twitter, image gallery, author bio etc.

Some of these are just tutorials on how features work within WordPress and how to incorporate them into existing themes while others are all our modifications of code in themes and in various other places. None of them look too difficult and some of them can be accomplished with plugins. However, all of them are worth checking out.

Transport

It’s dark, and stylish, with a static patterned background, it’s grey with a dash of blue. It has two columns, and is widget ready.

White 2 cols

it is plain, simple, and grey and white.

Blue

Simple two column, blue theme.

Green Island

Two column, green and blue theme. This theme uses the frontpage as a summery of the blog/site. Not only can you see the latest posts, you can also see the about-page, the categories and the tags.

Captcha is broken - now what? The Guardian. I was quoted in today’s Guardian, which consistently has some of the best tech coverage around.

Any way I put together the title it was this long monstrosity, so I just removed the filler words and then some.

So, one of the WordCamp SF sessions that I was eagerly awaiting the video being available to share is Kathy Seirra’s “Kicking Ass and Creating Passionate Users”:

Kathy Seirra is one of my favorite speakers, because she makes me feel like I can kick fleshy parts you sit on too!

Finally the New Shop and Members Area are online!
I’ve been working on it straight for a few days…

So what’s new?

*The Shop*

1. First you will notice that finally you can purchase multiple licenses of the same skin or multiple products at once, since we now have a full fledge shopping…

I recently got a email from a plugin developer, with regards to him having compatibility issues with one of the plugins I had developed. It turned out that both our plugins used a popular library called PclZip for adding archiving features. Due to the compatibility issue, accessing his plugin would cause a fatal PHP error saying that the PclZip class cannot be re-declared, when both our plugins were activated.

The compatibility issue arose because of two things;

1. A mistake on his part while checking for existence of class objects in the code.
2. A mistake on my part of using custom libraries, instead of using those provided by WordPress core.

Here is a code snippet used to check for class existence.

if(! function_exists(’class_name’)) {
   require_once(’myclass.php’);
}
$object = new class_name();

The above code is wrong, since:

1. Class names cannot be accessed as functions.
2. The internal methods of a class are not available for checks, unless one decides to instantiate the class and use the method_exists instead.

The correct way to check if a class exists or not can be seen in the following code.

if(! class_exists(’class_name’)) {
   require_once(’myclass.php’);
}
$object = new class_name();

This change in code actually solved the compatibility issue, but I would like to discuss a bit further on why one should rely on libraries provided by WordPress core instead of using their own custom libraries. The fatal error could have been avoided, if my plugin made use of the the library files from core WordPress, instead of using custom libraries included with my plugin.

If both our plugins had relied on the library files provided by WordPress, the require_once directive would not have re-evaluated the “same file” again, thus avoiding the duplicate class issue. Earlier versions of WordPress did not include many popular libraries, and many plugins include those libraries to provide backward compatibility. If you have to provide backward compatibility for your plugins, be sure to add in a WordPress version check so that you can rely on your own libraries, only when a version of WordPress does not provide it, doing this will certainly do away with having to tackle the compatibility issues caused by plugins using different files for the same libraries.

Update: Including files for backward compatibility can be accomplished by using the following code.

if(!class_exists(’PclZip’)) {
  if(file_exists(ABSPATH.’wp-admin/includes/class-pclzip.php’)) {
    require_once(ABSPATH.’wp-admin/includes/class-pclzip.php’);
  }
  else {
    require_once(’/path/to/your/lib/class-pclzip.php’);
  }
}

It is also a good practice to include the classes only when you require them, and later destroy the object by using the unset() method. This is a non-exhaustive resource for tackling compatibility issues between plugins, and I will try and research more on other things that can help avoid these issues and keep informing you about them.

If you have your own advice about avoiding such issues, please do share them with us.

Further reading from PHP documentation:

• class_exists
• function_exists
• method_exists
• require_once