The Free Software Foundation has announced they have released the GNU General Public License in version 3. You may read the announcement and the license here. The next versions of my plugins will already be relesed under the V3 and I encourage everyone to upgrade their OpenSource software to be available under the GPL V3!
Today, I have launched two separate wordpress installations that act as a testing platform to support plugin develoment and -debugging without risking to destroy a production wordpress installation. One of the test sites, found here, will always feature the latest release of wordpress. The other test site, found here, runs the obsolete 1.5.2 version of wordpress, to test the downward compatibility of newer plugins. I will mainly use these test blogs for my plugin reviews and the development of my own plugins, but if you are a plugin author, you are welcome to send me a copy of your plugin to be tested in those environments. BTW, both installations are non-standard-directory installations of Wordpress that can help people developing on standard installations find problems and mistakes in their plugin’s directory implementation.
Featuring an enhanced automatic update checking and installation mechanism that keeps your wordpress plugins up to date, a mechanism to install problematic non-standard plugin packages and to find and remove broken plugin installations.
Download the plugin here or support the development by donating!
Usually, we say “there is good news and there is bad news. Which one would you like to hear first?”. As most people generally want to hear the bad news first, let’s start with that:
The development of automatic plugin checking for PlugInstaller 0.2 has proven to be more complex that I first thought, so I have not been able to implement the full functionality yet.
And now the good news:
As version 0.2 incorporates some important fixes for people with non-standard-directory installations of WordPress, I have decided to release the current version anyway. I have called this version 0.1.9 with 0.2 to follow within the next few days. And the best is: Update checking (and, of course, automatic update installation) already works for some of the plugins, so be sure to hit the “check for updated plugins” button as soon as you have installed 0.1.9.
Download from here!
The next steps towards PlugInstaller 0.2 are taken! As 0.2 will be a major release, several new features will be included, for example:
There are still some things to do and it will take some more days to complete the release, but for those of you who already want to try the new version, I have provided a preview version for download: PlugInstaller 0.2 preview version (be sure to upgrade to the final version if it becomes available!)
Due to a mistake during development, version 0.1.6 of PlugInstaller did not solve all the problems for people who are unable to download file using fopen_wrappers. Thanks to a contribution by angrycamel, this problem is solved in version 0.1.7.
You are currently using PlugInstaller and would like to contribute to it’s development and to the way it is going in the future? Be sure to take this survey!
As a research towards version 0.2 of my plugInstaller Plugin I have developed a small php library that incorporates a fallback to cURL where fopen_wrappers are disabled. The problem with plugInstaller has been the fact that several servers do have fopen_wrappers disabled (for whatever reasons) and need to fall back to cURL to download files from the net. This is the case if some users of your script get the error message saying fopen(): url file-access is disabled in the server configuration.
As I do not want to rewrite the complete download code for plugInstaller, I have developed two small fopen/fclose replacement routines called uopen and uclose. When changing all fopen()/fclose() calls to uopen and uclose respectively within a script, the cURL fallback functionality is immediately enabled. uopen() and uclose() will check if fopen_wrappers are available and will then open or close the specified URL using fopen and fclose. If that fails (because fopen_wrappers are disabled), the functions will try to open the output of the cURL commandline utility as a process file handle. You can then use the returned file pointer as it were opened with fopen(). uopen and uclose work exactly the same way as fopen and fclose do (they take the same parameters and return the same values), so you may even use them for local file access.
If you are interested in using those two functions, just download them here (1,09 KB), they are released under the GPL!
So, nach meinem Login zeigt mir der “Tellerrand” (wieso eigentlich Tellerrand? Ich meine, eigentlich ermöglicht einem diese Seite doch, über selbigen hinauszusehen…) an, daß Wordpress 2.2 released sei. Mal schauen, ob ich in den nächsten Tagen die Zeit und Muße finde, mal ein Upgrade zu wagen. Wenn ich fertig bin, schreibe ich natürlich auch darüber, wies war und ob man das Ding brauchen kann. Naja, und eine größere Überarbeitung des Templates wäre vielleicht auch nicht unangebracht… verdammt, das klingt nach Arbeit.
PlugInstaller 0.1.5 has been released today! As promised, the following new features and fixes have been implemented: