I get a lot of feature requests and customization requests for my event management WordPress plug-in. These requests range from minor tweaks, which I can add as features in less than 10 minutes to major re-skinning and behavioral changes. When I get a request which can potentially be worked into the calendar software as a permanent part of the plug-in, I’m usually happy to take on that work — but I only have so much time, and I’d rather put that time in on making a better plug-in rather than doing new styling and custom behaviors.

So, I’m in need of a few people who are skilled developers with strong CSS, JavaScript and/or WordPress/PHP experience. I’ll maintain this list as people I trust to do high-quality customization work with My Calendar (or with other work, potentially).

Mostly, this will be CSS/JavaScript work. There may be occasional needs to PHP customizations, but that will probably be more rare.

If you’re interested in being on this list, please contact me. Provide a couple of work samples where you’ve done CSS/JavaScript work. If possible, an actual instance of customizing My Calendar would be very beneficial.

This isn’t likely to be a flood of work – but what I’m getting is more than what I can do.

Thank you!

At the end of October, I took a very needed vacation. Naturally, I couldn’t just go on vacation, so while I was taking a break I developed two new WordPress plug-ins: My Content Management and Content Progress.

These are plug-ins designed primarily for developers, really — although a novice user can probably get something out of them, even so. They aren’t terribly complicated; they’re just designed as plug-ins which are used for developing new web sites.

About My Content Management

The first of the two, My Content Management, is a tool which creates a suite of custom post types intended to fulfill a variety of special content needs which are common to many web sites. Obviously, these can be done using normal pages, as well — or dedicated plug-ins for the specific content, but I like to have the option to use a standard, common interface. Using this plug-in, you can have an FAQ, Testimonials, Staff Members, an artist’s Portfolio, etc. — all using the same interface.

If you normally develop web sites and then train your client’s to maintain the site themselves, it’s a tremendous help to have a standardized interface for all the content they need to add!

The plug-in features highly customizable templates for three different views of each content type; shortcodes to display the content; widgets for lists of content; special custom field support for the content; and custom taxonomies for each content type.

About Content Progress

This is really a simple plug-in, but particularly useful during the early content development stages for any web site. Content Progress adds a flag to the posts list view which allows you to easily pick out which pages have not been completed. For large sites, this can be particularly handy when you need to keep track of what has and hasn’t been taken care of.

There are two automatic labels: marking pages which have no content or which have very little content, since these are common indicators that content still needs to be completed. Since these are obviously not a complete picture of the site, there are also two manual flags, to specifically mark pages as completed or incomplete.

Hopefully, developers and content creators will find these plug-ins useful!

• Download “My Content Management”
• Download “Content Progress”

In point of fact, My Calendar version 1.9 is ready to go. It’s packaged up, ready to be shipped out. (Well, promoted to the subversion repository. Whatever.)

However, I’m not ready to launch it yet — and this is just because I’ve been very short of time recently, and I don’t anticipate this changing soon. I don’t believe that there are any major bugs in the release — I’m sure there are small ones, despite the time I’ve spent on testing, but probably nothing earth-shattering. However, I have to be realistic — I don’t know this for sure. And because of that, I need to delay the full launch. This isn’t because I’m worried about the possibility of problems, particularly. Rather, it’s because on the off-hand chance that there are problems, I simply don’t have the time right now to be able to deal with them responsibly.

That’s a worrying position – if I launch, and there’s a major problem, I may not be able to fix it promptly. No matter how confident I am in the preparation of this version, that’s clearly grounds to delay. Unfortunately, I’ve been delaying for a long time; partially because I keep adding new features, and partially because I’ve been too busy for a while.

So I’m making this available here, now — version 1.9.0 can be downloaded now. I’m launching it here, instead of through the WordPress repository, because I know that many, many fewer people will get a hold of it here. This means fewer potential problems, and it’s much more likely I’ll be able to deal with any problems responsibly.

Since you don’t have easy access to the changelog, like you would at WordPress.org, here are the changes which apply to the new version:

Additions:

• template editing for list, grid, mini, and single event output.
• pop-up box is now draggable.
• date format option for grid mode, week view.
• templating for details link text.
• templating for event URL link text.
• location filtering from shortcode.
• image upload option for events
• day class to calendar date headings and cells
• individual instances of repeating events can be edited
• feature to add multiple occurrences of an event simultaneously. (concept from Dave Heitzman)
• feature to mass edit information for groups of events (concept from Dave Heitzman)
• stored URL for locations (contrib by John Colvin)
• recurring daily events on weekdays only (based on contrib by John Colvin)
• optional templating for all event output formats
• individual event occurrence iCal export
• numerous additional template tags
• Option to use custom location filter fields as data control
• Shortcode to generate list of saved locations
• Network administrators can control whether sub-site calendars contribute only to a central calendar, only to their own calendar, or whether site administrators can make that choice.
• Upgrade notice information in dashboard for future upgrades.
• implementation of WordPress text diff to compare your styles and scripts against my current released versions
• Option to skip a defined number of events in upcoming events lists.

Bug fixes:

• jump box was displaying in week/grid view.
• some potentially repeatable IDs (code validation).
• ‘Administrators see all options’ did not work.
• Fixed timestamps on main calendar objects
• Squashed e_notice errors.
• category limiting did not work without permalinks due to GET variable conflict with WordPress core
• Missing nonce in database upgrade routine
• Mini calendar simultaneously displayed single event view when visited.
• Link generation for details view did not work if calendar link parameterized
• Issue with weekdays only calendar if day of week set to start on Sunday
• Issue with retrieval of user-specific settings
• Issue with accessing styles and javascript if My Calendar installed in non-standard directory.
• Problem in Today’s Events widget when Holiday restrictions are enabled.

Changes:

• replaced all default icons with 24-bit transparent PNGs
• jumpbox output to automatically scope to the oldest dates in the database.
• iCal output to output event for complete current month
• RSS output to prioritize newly added events
• holiday skipping/fifth week customization moved into event manager function
• new ‘close’ icon for pop-up box; added close icon and scripting to mini calendar pop-up
• copy in several places; updated template tags.
• location lists sorted by location label (contrib by John Colvin)
• Eliminated calendar heading option
• default style resets no longer stored in global variables, instead stored as files.
• Map links now trigger the driving directions dialog in Google Maps
• New default stylesheet, refresh.css

As an accessibility consultant and passionate standards advocate, I’m generally in the position of appreciating the concerns of the minority. As a WordPress plug-in developer, I have a much harder time with it. In fact, as a WordPress plug-in developer, I find the vocal minority very, very frustrating.

So I’m just going to whinge a little bit. You can stop reading now if you’re going to be a dick about it.

I recently released a new version (version 2.3.x) of my plug-in WP to Twitter, which does exactly what it says — posts status updates from WordPress to Twitter. This release included a couple of heavily demanded features, including support for custom post types and for tweeting updates on comments.

I’ll admit that there were a couple minor bugs in that release — as a result, I’ve released two updates since then, cleaning up those errors.

Some people, in reading this post, will quibble with the statement that they were minor bugs — and I’m sure that those who were affected by them don’t think so. That’s perfectly fair.

What really bugs me, however, is that if I look at the only real metrics I have for estimating the success of a new feature release, then I’d have to judge that this was a complete and utter failure. Since that release, I’ve had dozens of support requests because of bugs, a handful of small donations adding up to at most $45 (if I include all contributions which weren’t attributable to a specific project), and on the WP to Twitter page at WordPress.org, the “works” gauge has been hovering between split towards broken. And the only working vote was mine.

However, I know that this isn’t really accurate. The reason that I know this is because about a year and a half ago, give or take a few months, I did release a version of the same plug-in that was *really* broken. That was a definite screw-up. At the time, WP to Twitter was a much less popular plug-in, so the impact was dampened, but in the first few hours after release I had several dozen e-mails and support requests informing me of the problem.

In this case, there’ve been 20,000 plus downloads of the updated version with a handful of people (about 10-12) complaining of problems. In my estimation, this is a very small number of issues given the apparent numbers of users.

But I don’t really know that, because I don’t hear very much from those who have a good experience.

This is actually pretty intentional. WP to Twitter is supposed to work quietly in the background — it’s not supposed to be an “in-your-face” plug-in. So when it works, people don’t notice it. However, from my seat today, it seems somewhat demoralizing. It makes me very seriously wonder why I continue to work on WP to Twitter. (For the record, I get a lot more positive feedback on My Calendar, which does help.)

Nonetheless, I have no intention to discontinue support for WP to Twitter. Maybe it’s just an ego trip, but it’s certainly helped me build a thick skin…

First of all, I released version 2.2.7 today. This version is mostly a bug fix and error message improvement release, intended to help users solve their own problems more easily, as well as enhancing the overall stability of the plug-in with a wider variety of installation scenarios.

Second, I want you to know about my WP to Twitter Fundry page. Fundry is a site which helps developers raise money to improve their projects. There are a handful of pledges already, but I’m hoping to be able to use this as a way to both fund improvements to the plug-in and to know what kinds of changes are really the most desired in the user base.

Finally, I thought I’d mention that Vladimir Prelovac has recently released a new plug-in called WP Quick Deploy. This plug-in is meant to provide people with a method to quickly and easily install a variety of their favorite plug-ins, and he’s chosen to include WP to Twitter as one of the recommended tools available in the social media section of his plug-in. This sounds like a great time-saver of a project, especially for developers, so I highly recommend you take a look at it!

My Calendar version 1.7.0 is about to be released. This version contains a large number of significant changes, some of which may have consequences for your existing installation. I have taken every precaution I could, but there are aspects inherent in the automatic update process which cannot easily be tested thoroughly in advance. In preparation for the release, I strongly recommend that you make a copy of your current styles and note the settings of the Upcoming and Today’s Events widgets.

Both widgets have been entirely replaced with the WordPress Multiwidget class, which will allow you to use multiple individual instances of your widgets.

The stylesheet editor is moving from a database-driven editor to a file-based editor, which will increase the cacheability of the plug-in styles, improving performance of your site when using the styles. This also comes with the ability to choose between several different stylesheets.

Well, it’s a day for updates. Today was (at one point) the deadline for Twitter to permanently disable Basic authentication. The date has now been extended to August 31st, but the difference isn’t really significant.

The one benefit which it will provide is a little extra time to debug the new OAuth version of WP to Twitter before it becomes the only working version.

There are a lot of complications surrounding the OAuth update — most of them unfortunate. For the first time since I began work on this plugin, I had to remove features. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to operate two separate user accounts with an OAuth authenticated application, for example. As a result, I’ve had to remove the ability to assign separate author accounts for Twitter posting. As development progresses, a way forward may show up — but for now, I just don’t really have another option.

My biggest request at this time: if you can, please decide you’re willing to use this version now, to provide me with feedback so it will work as well as it possibly can when all past versions cease to be functional.

There will be problems; I’m sure of it. I just hope to find them all soon enough.