The Four-eyed Journal » WordPress-2.2 http://jrocas.com.ph A geek's musings on technology, politics, the web & life Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:54:07 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 How to monitor plugin updates http://jrocas.com.ph/archives/how-to-monitor-plugin-updates/ http://jrocas.com.ph/archives/how-to-monitor-plugin-updates/#comments Thu, 17 May 2007 00:49:54 +0000 jhay http://jrocas.com.ph/archives/how-to-monitor-plugin-updates/

Yesterday’s release of WordPress 2.2 has prompted a wave of upgrades again not just in WordPress-powered blogs but it includes the hundreds if not thousands of WordPress plugins that make the blogging software one, if not the best blogging platform out there.

Also, yesterday’s successful upgrade of this blog to WordPress 2.2 was smooth and painless all thanks to miracle that all of the plugins that power The Four-eyed Journal were compatible with the version of WordPress. This has eliminated the need to visit each plugin’s site for updates or fixes in case it has some incompatibility issues with the new version. So I’m a lucky blogger, and so as Jaypee, but what about the others who weren’t and had to hold out on upgrading to the latest version of WordPress because a plugin or two doesn’t jive well with ‘Getz’?

All of this could’ve been avoided if we bloggers were to keep up to date on the plugins we use. Sure plugin authors and developers offer support for their plugins, some who still continue developing their plugins offer updates and even dedicated sections of their blogs for this purpose.

Question now is, do we regularly visit them? Do we check up on them from time to time? A common observation among us bloggers is once we successfully installed a plugin, integrated it into our theme and even made some custom hacks, we completely forget about them in terms of maintenance and updates.

We only remember and bother to check up on the plugin’s home page or author site if it gets broken or it gets in the way of some upgrades to our WordPress blogs or other plugins. In this light, some plugin authors are in a way being under appreciated. This is because we only got to know these authors because we decided to use their plugins, we neglect the fact that most of these authors are bloggers as well, and it turns out, they are good bloggers too.

So to bridge this gap, help us prevent blogs being broken by outdated plugins and to give something back to the plugin authors aside from piles of support tickets or e-mails, here’s a simple tip on how to keep updated about the plugins we use for our WordPress blogs.

Bookmark all of them in one folder

You go to Plugins management page in the WordPress admin area, right-click on every active plugin and choose “Bookmark This Link…”

Then create a bookmark folder solely for the homepages of the plugins you use.

Give it a custom name, something to help you remember what’s the folder for and what’s in it.

Do the same thing to the rest of the plugins you actively use.

Once you’ve added all the links, go to Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks menu in Firefox. Then simply drag the folder to your Bookmarks Toolbar and presto! Updates and fixes for your plugins are now a click-away.

This neat tip could be extended into your feed reader because hey, these authors are bloggers as well, so why don’t we give them a boost in their subscription stats and add their feeds to our reader. I’m sure they offer good posts as well as good plugins.

]]> http://jrocas.com.ph/archives/how-to-monitor-plugin-updates/feed/ 5 Smooth upgrade to WordPress 2.2 http://jrocas.com.ph/archives/smooth-upgrade-to-wordpress-22/ http://jrocas.com.ph/archives/smooth-upgrade-to-wordpress-22/#comments Wed, 16 May 2007 13:36:04 +0000 jhay http://jrocas.com.ph/archives/smooth-upgrade-to-wordpress-22/

Against my early pronouncements about a month ago, I gave in to my obsessive-compulsiveness and upgraded this blog to the latest major release of WordPress which is version 2.2 which was named after renowned saxophonist Stan Getz.

The reasons why one should hold out on upgrading immediately once version 2.2 comes out is that plugins you currently use could be incompatible with the latest version and would result to anything from a messed up theme or the tragedy of a broken WP database. Numerous blog disasters were born this way and the only remedies would be reverting back to the previous version or completely restarting from scratch. Even the great John Chow of John Chow dot com succumbed to this problem when he attempted to upgrade his blog earlier today. Both tasks could be as ugly as the broken upgrade if one is fully prepared.

So again, we emphasize and remind all WordPress users to backup your blog files and database before attempting an upgrade.

Fortunately for this blogger, the upgrade to version 2.2 went on smoothly and without a single glitch. Of course I backed up my database, wp-config.php and the .htaccess files, downloaded a copy of WordPress 2.2, unzipped the package, fired up my FTP client and uploaded the new WP files.

Again, of course I deactivated all the plugins I currently use before actually uploading the files to the server. It was a nerve-wracking moment because I didn’t bother to check each plugin’s homepage to see if any had issues with WordPress 2.2 and if fixes or upgrades have been made to it.

It was leap of faith as I went on with the upgrade. To my relief and delight, all the plugins I use are compatible with WordPress 2.2 To help out the other anxious bloggers in identifying which plugins are compatible with WordPress 2.2 or not, I’ve listed all the active plugins running in this blog that, has so far, been running well with WP 2.2

This is quite an extensive list of plugins

Imagine the chaos if more than one of these plugins were not compatible with WordPress 2.2, luckily for all of us who use them they work perfectly with the new version. For those who use a hacked or customized version of any of this plugins, visit their homepages and get in touch with their makers, I’m sure a fix or an update to the plugin will be available.

Again, if all your plugins are fully compatible with WordPress 2.2, I encourage that your set aside ample time to make the upgrade, it is definitely worth it. Especially since the following features are now included:

  • WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by default in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.
  • Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
  • A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.
  • Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background so you always have 20 items on the page. (I know it sounds geeky, but try it!)
  • We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.
  • Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.
  • We’ve added a hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

Over all, this a good major upgrade to the blogging software we bloggers have come to love. Again, give it a download and upgrade your blog as soon as possible.

Now, we just have to wait for all the bugs to come out.

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