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AJAX’d Wordpress is now officially a release candidate which translates to an advanced Beta. I’m hoping to officially release within a few weeks, but I will only do this after there has been ample testing on different themes and with other plugins, so I am looking for a few good, adventurous souls to help me test it in different environments.
This website has been running aWP for several week and there don’t seem to be any problems, but please ensure that you test this plugin in a developmental environment before using it on a live website. AJAX’d Wordpress is built off of INAP which was reaching maturity, so I don’t expect there to be a large number of problems, but it has changed drastically, so I expect at least a few new bugs have been created. I am also concerned about compatibility with other plugins.
Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages, and all the rest of you who dislike being labeled. I now present to you, in living color, the one and only AJAX’d Wordpress.
AJAX’d Wordpress or aWP is a complete rewrite of INAP that will allow features to be added and modified very quickly. This plugin is truly modular and unlike INAP, is completely customizable. While not available for download just yet, it has now gone live on this website. For those of you that are technically inclined, you will quickly be able to see the changes by viewing the source, Javascript and AJAX responses, but for the rest, you will be able to see the smoother functionality and the more attractive behavior.
Documentation has to be written and expanded and a few features still need to be improved, but we are looking at a RC release in a few weeks.
Now that you have gotten used to WP 2.3 and had time to fiddle around with all those tags, you are probably finding that you need to edit, rename or delete tags. While I was going to write my own Plugins for this for a while, I found the perfect Plugins to do the work for me — and by perfect I mean really good, so I take no responsibility if they eat your dog.
The Simple Tags has been around for a long time, but now it works perfectly with Wordpress tagging. What does it do? Most everything you could want (I could retype the list, but I’m going to borrow it straight from the Simple Tags website):
- type-ahead input tags
- auto suggestion of tags
- tags management (rename, delete, amalgamate, search and add tags, edit tags ID)
- List of non tagged contents
- Edit mass tags
- Possibility to tag pages (not only posts) and include them inside the tags results
- Related content since common tags
- Possibility to add related posts inside RSS
- Dynamic Tag Clouds with colors with Widgets
- Tags inside your header’s blog
- Embedded tags ([tags]tag1, tag2[/tags]) for retro compatibility
I use a lot of Plugins and write a lot of Plugins, so the fact that I even use one usually means it is really well made or very useful, but this one is one of the very few that I thought was good enough to promote.
I’ve been getting ready for Wordpress 2.3, so in preparation I’ve started cleaning up my database. My first order of business was to clean up the tags database. Over time I’ve used several different methods of separating words: all spaces, hyphens and underscores have all been used which really makes the nice names ugly. Fixing this was easy, I just used the MYSQL replace command:
UPDATE `table` SET `field` = REPLACE(Field,'change_me','to_me');Or specifically for the tags:
UPDATE `wp_tags` SET `tag` = REPLACE(tag,'_',' ');
Trapping WordPress errors with output buffering.
If you have tried to use AJAX with WordPress, most likely you have stumbled upon the wp_die() function which completely kills the response you expect to get. However, we can trap the wp_die() by using PHP’s output buffering and the ob_start callback function to process the output of wp_die() even though a die() is called. This is a very special case, and will only work when you are able to ensure output buffering can be called before the die is called.
The easiest way to get a non-fatal wp_die() error (an error that shouldn’t cause the entire application to stop) is when submitting comments: non-fatal errors occur whenever someone posts too quickly or submits a duplicate comment, so this can be a problem when creating an AJAX app to submit comments (I ran into this problem with INAP.)
Since AJAX makes the entire submit process very quick, so it is easy to trigger the “Posting too quickly” error if the user make short comments, and when this happens an entire page –complete with CSS and headers– is returned as the AJAX response.
INAP 3.0 Progress
Aside from a brief flirtation with a couple payed projects, I’ve been heavily focusing on rewriting the code for INAP 3.0, and it has almost reached the point of a private beta (which means I start running it on this site.) I have selected the new name for INAP 3.0, but I’m not going to reveal it just yet. Here is a small preview of what you can expect from INAP 3.0:
INAP 3.0 is now truly modular with a main Javascript/PHP core that other features hook into to function. This core is easily extensible and the new structure of a main project with many smaller projects will make bugfixes and upgrades less painful, and will allow the user to upgrade the plugin section by section as most changes in the modules won’t effect the core.
For the users:
- INAP 3.0 will make upgrades far less painful.
