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:

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.

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.

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.