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!

Many people have asked to be able to replace the TinyMCE rich text editor (RTE) shipped along with WordPress by their favorite RTE. As my favorite RTE is FCKeditor (which I have successfully used in many projects), I have started to develop a plugin that is able to replace TinyMCE by FCKeditor. This greatly enhances the possibilities when writing articles in WordPress, like comfortably embedding flash, tables, and smileys , as well as text formatting.

There is still a lot to do (like connecting the image browser), but this article has actually been written with FCKeditor. Stay tuned for the first beta release!

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:

• Complete integration of install/uninstall functions into a redesigned plugin management page
• Automatic updating of plugins (at least for wordpress.org hosted plugins)
• As well as some minor changes that will eliminate possible problems on non-standard WP installations.

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.

More information and download

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!

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Wie lange ist das jetzt her? Ich weiß nicht wieso ich ausgerechnet jetzt darauf komme, aber vor einigen Tagen oder Wochen kam mir am Bahnhof die Idee, doch ein eisgekühltes, milchbasiertes Erfrischungsgetränk mit künstlichem Geschmack zu erwerben. Ich also rein in die Filiale des Franchisenehmers einer bekannten internationalen Fast-Food-Kette. Meine Überraschung war groß, als ich dort neben den üblichen Sorten Erdbeer, Vanille und Schokolade eine Aktionswerbung sah, die mir “Milchshake Kirsch” anpries. Wieso ich mich dann dafür entschieden habe weiß der Geier, aber wer wissen will, wie es weitergeht, sollte hier unbedingt weiterlesen…

Finally, PlugInstaller does also feature plugin downloads with cURL on servers that have fopen_wrappers disabled. You don’t need to configure anything, the plugin will automatically determine if fopen can open URLs and fall back to cURL support if fopen fails.

This is just a minor upgrade which does only add cURL support. More features will be introduced in the 0.2 version.

If you get the fopen(): url file-access is disabled in the server configuration error on using PlugInstaller, you should upgrade to this version.

More information and download

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!

Häufig werde ich von Leuten angesprochen, wie wissen wollen, wie sie an günstige Bahn-Tickets kommen können. Aus diesem Grund habe ich mich dazu entschlossen, die wichtigsten Tricks und Kniffe zum Sparen bei Bahnreisen in einer Übersicht zusammenzustellen, in der jeder Bahnfahrer sein individuelles Szenario heraussuchen kann um die besten Spartipps für seine individuellen Bedürfnisse zu bekommen.

Ihr findet diese Aufstellung hier unter Bahnfahren billig gemacht.

Manche Leute haben zu wenig zu tun. Ganz offenbar. Oder auch zu viel Geld… was auch immer. Der neueste Trend des Web-4′294′967′295.0, auch das “Web-MaxInt” genannt, weil es nämlich so ganz allmählich für ein normales Hirn kaum noch zu fassen ist, welche mehr- oder weniger schwachsinnigen Methoden sich die Noch-Dotcom-2.0-Startupper und baldigen Dotcom-2.0-Startup-Bankrotteure noch einfallen lassen, um sich möglichst schnell in den Ruin zu treiben sowie Google um weitere Millarden reicher zu machen, ist doch tatsächlich das sogenannte “MicroBlogging”, das genau so unglaublich überflüssig ist wie dieser, durch eine große Anzahl von Nebensätzen verunstaltete Satz.

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