Rebelic Interactive Consultancy

I was reading an article by OZH about ‘Top 10 Most Common Coding Mistakes in WordPress Plugins‘ and besides that I’m doing some stuff terribly wrong, I also stumbled upon the follow paragraph:

Compatibility maintained with deprecated versions of WordPress

I’ve seen code comments mentioning stuff like “// we’re doing this for people using WP 2.5″. This one is more a personal choice, but I think maintaining compatibility with older versions is a terrible idea.

Terrible for you: fixing bugs and implementing new features is quite a task already, don’t add to the burden with more deprecated code.

Terrible for the users: it’s nice that your plugin is going to run fine on their obsolete, insecure and already hacked blog, but it really does not motivate them to upgrade, which is vital.

I know I’ve dropped backward compat with my plugins a long time ago, and always code for the latest release available. It makes life so much easier :)

I totally agree that it is a big mistake running an outdated blog and will drop support for all older versions of Wordpress immediately. Sorry folks running version 2.5, please upload the latest version and do the upgrade! Or let me do it for you ;)

f»dforward is a widget based recommendation network that increases readership of blogs by more interested and relevant readers. f»dforward lets you connect with new blogs based on similar content and incorporates social elements like the “follow me” tools of Twitter, where they will follow content around the web instead of following conversations. f»dforward lets you grow your own blog network in a natural way by bringing you related and recommended articles connected to what you just published. f»dforward lets the blogger see who has been reading and makes recommendations visible and viral for their readers. In addition, f»dforward can help publishers improve reach and revenue through the analysis of what people are reading on and off their sites, which helps publishers like Het Parool and ILSE Media to create better content and make better connections with it.

More information about f»dforward can be found on getfeedforward.com.

Of course there is also a Wordpress plugin available to ease the integration. See the f»dforward recommendation network page for more info about the plugin.

Prezi offers a new way of using presentation software. Prezi presentations are slide-less and make use of moving and zooming into an infinate workspace. Unfortunatly they are a bit hard to embed. You could of course use an iframe tag, but everytime you edit your post or page, that iframe tag gets filtered out.

So I’ve written a small plugin to embed Prezi into your posts and pages. Just put [ prezi] and [ /prezi] (without the spaces) around your Prezi URL and your done! The plugin also adds a custom button to the Visual Editor so you don’t have to remember these codes and just insert your URL.

More info is available on the Prezi Shortcude plugin page.

JanRain RPX is a hosted service that makes it simple to enable OpenID (Google, MySpace, MS Live, Yahoo!, AOL, ….) , Facebook Connect and even Twitter Connect on your blog. Visitors don’t have to register on your blog and remember another username and password, but are still able to use all the features on your blog. At the same time, you as the blog owner receive valuable information about your users. Profile information, email addresses, avatars and even friends lists can be passed on to your blog when someone logs in through RPX.

RPX offers a single API and works as a proxy between your website and the identity providers, and is transparent to the end user. Adding RPX to your website doesn’t require any changes to your database and is the ideal solution for Wordpress. With their Wordpress plugin it’s really just plug and play.

Lees de rest van ‘Achieve higher registration rates on your blog with RPX’

With the Twitter Publisher plugin you can send automated tweets out when you publish a new post. It will add Google Campaign variables to the URL using the new URL shortener Awe.sm or Bit.ly. For larger blogs, with multiple authors, you can include the author’s Twitter name in the tweet and individual author’s can send Tweets from their account at the same time the main account is sending them.

You can download the plugin at Wordpress.org.

Always wanted to know where your traffic really came from? Did it come from Twitter? Or maybe from your RSS feeds? It’s now possible to track your incoming traffic with Google Analytics by using one of my plugins.

Add Google Campaign variables to your RSS feeds with my RSSLinktagger plugin.

I’ve just created a new version of the modified Twitter-tools plugin (originally made by Alex King). The two changes are; the removal of the update notification (which will upgrade the plugin to the newest version of Twitter-tools instead of my modified version) and the option to include utm query parameters, used by Google Analytics to track non-adwords advertising campaigns. Besides clicks measured by Tweetburner, you can now also use Google Analytics to tracks visitors coming from Twitter. (This will work for Tweetburner and Tinyurl).

Enjoy! You can find the updated version here.

For more information about this plugin, please visit my Tweetburner.com plugin page.

(Op zoek naar de Nederlandse versie van dit artikel?)

This plugin is a modified version of the Twitter-tools plugin, written by Alex King. Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. One of those features is tweeting you’re blogposts to Twitter. The URL’s of your blog posts are translated to TinyURL’s by Twitter, to stay within 140 characters. This modified plugin uses Tweetburner.com to shorten the URL’s.

Tweetburner.com?

Tweetburner.com lets you track what happens with the links you share on Twitter, and shortens it on the way too. For example http://trebel.nl/blog/2008/03/28/wordpress-plugin-voor-tweetburnercom/is translated into http://twurl.nl/ybetg8 and they offer personal statistics for tracking the clicks and shares of your ‘twurls’.

Further features Twitter-tools

Besides tweeting your blog post, Twitter Tools also offers:

• Archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 15 minutes)
• Create a blog post from each of your tweets
• Create a daily digest post of your tweets
• Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post
• Post a tweet from your sidebar
• Post a tweet from the WP Admin screens
• Pass your tweets along to another service (via API hook)

Installation

1. Download the plugin archive and expand it.
2. Put the file into your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
3. Go to the Plugins page in your WordPress Administration area and click ‘Activate’ for Twitter Tools.
4. Go to the Twitter Tools Options page (Options > Twitter Tools) to set your Twitter account information and preferences.

For more information about installing and configuring the Twitter Tools plugin, please visit their site

Download plugin v0.3 (beta)

New features

In a short while, I will be developing my own version of a ‘Tweeting to Twitter by using Tweetburner’ plugin. A couple of intended features are:

• A Twitter account per author, instead of one twitter account for your installation
• En-/Disable tweeting per category
• Importing Tweetburner statistic’s (Tweetburner is thinking of integrating this into their API)

Sommigen van jullie hebben mij vanmiddag al zien testen en vroegen al wanneer de Tweetburner.com plugin te download zou zijn. Wel, bij deze! Hij is nog erg beta, dat wil zeggen; hij werkt op mijn Wordpress 2.3 installatie, maar geen idee of hij bij jullie ook werkt.

Voor de mensen die nog niet weten wat Tweetburner.com is: “[They] allow you to keep track of what happens to the links in tweets shared with you, by you, by your friends and every other twitterer.” Voor de mensen die tinyurl.com al wel kennen; het is vergelijkbaar, maar dan beter ;)

De plugin is een aangepaste versie van de Twitter-plugin Twitter-tools, met 2 extra’s: Je kunt vanuit het menu kiezen voor Tinyurl.com of Tweetburner.com en je kunt de prefix van de tweet aanpassen. (Zelf vind ik ‘New blog post: ‘ niet zo mooi). Oh voorlopig is het trouwens ook nog verplicht om CURL geinstalleerd te hebben op je server, dit moet ik ook nog even aanpassen, zodat hij gebruikt gaat maken van Snoopy (wat Wordpress ook gebruikt voor het verbinden naar API’s).

De aankomende tijd zal er nog wel eea veranderen en zal deze changes ook doorgeven aan Alex King, misschien stopt hij hem dan wel in de officiele release. Voor de rest is deze plugin eigenlijk veel te uitgebreid voor waarvoor de meeste hem gebruiken: Nieuwe blog posts op Twitter announcen en zal ik binnenkort nog eens kijken naar een kleine simpele plugin die enkel de aankondigingen naar Twitter verstuurd en niets meer.

Maar voor nu, veel plezier! Tips, bugs en opmerkingen zijn altijd welkom.

Download plugin (beta):

Handleiding: downloaden en plaatsen in de wp-content/plugins directory en daarna via Plugins menu activeren.