Pie Palace

Miniposts 0.6.8 is now out. It’s another fix release that removes post duplication issues, cleans up the preferences page, and fixes a couple of bugs with the smiley code that nataan contributed.

The big news is that the miniposts plugin is now hosted on Wordpress autoinstallation site, meaning that installation and upgrades should be easy peasy. Since this is my first hosted plugin, I’ve taken a quickie screenshot, so I can remember when my plugin’s average rating was 5/5:

I’ve updated miniposts to look nice in Wordpress 2.7. I’ve also included naatan’s smiley goop. Go download 0.6.7 now! (Or wait until Wordpress.org lets me host it in their plugin repository)

I’ve put together a new version of Miniposts2. It’s now Wordpress 2.5 compatible, and supports filtering miniposts from feeds. Along the way I found the migration doc useful. And I came to discover that Wordpress doesn’t really maintain any kind of backward compatibility between minor revisions.

Miniposts2 is a pretty simple blob of software, so it doesn’t deserve a name for every version (y’know, like Europa, or Leopard). Especially not this version. Version 0.6.5 is a bug fix that prevents pages disappearing from the admin view. It doesn’t add any of the promised features, nor does it address any other problems.

If I were to give this version a name, it would have to be appropriately unassuming, like “flatulent kitten,” “errant snail,” or “housebroken possum.”

If you’re a MiniPosts user, please take a look at the project page, or download 0.6.5 directly.

I’ve updated the MiniPosts plugin. This is a fix of a bug that was exposed by WordPress 2.1. In a nutshell: to detect changes in a posts aside status, the original author of MiniPosts hooked the edit_post action. It turns out that the edit_post action is called when comments are added to a post, which caused the callback to de-minipost-ify the blog entry.

Since the edit_post hook is called from all over the place, I’ve associated a nonce¹ with the checkbox that the user fills out for the miniposts. That allows the plugin to tell the difference between a legitimate change request, and a random one triggered by the promiscuous edit_post hook. That approach was suggested by Mark Jaquith.

Download version 0.6.4 or visit the MiniPosts project page.

1. A nonce is a secret number that has no real meaning, but occurs alongside of data you care about. Whenever you get data that you care about, you check it to see if the nonce is the value you expect. If the data is forged, the attacker will have to guess a value for the nonce. Since there are a huge number of possible nonces, an attacker has a pretty low chance of getting it right and fooling you into thinking that it’s coming from a legitimate source. (back)

I’ve released MiniPosts 0.6.3. For those who don’t know, MiniPosts are those itty bitty posts that appear in the right hand column of my blog.

The long list of features now includes:

• Teaser/Excerpt support. If you define a teaser using excerpt or the <!--more--> quicktag, the widget will only display that text. This was demanded by a few folks, so I’m glad that I could add it in painlessly.
  
• Editable title support. It’s now possible to edit the title of the MiniPosts widget without editing code.
  
• Asides are now searchable. Previously asides wouldn’t appear in search results.

Download! Enjoy!

Update: Please see the MiniPosts page for support and download information.

I’ve released an incremental improvement of MiniPosts2. It fixes a bug that caused comments languishing in moderation to be included in the comment count (whups); and adds a format specifier that allows users to include a posts’ date in the minipost information. Download! Install/Upgade! Enjoy!

I’ve released a bugfix of MiniPosts2. Download it from the MiniPosts page.