New version of Link Library adds new capacities

Yesterday saw the release of Link Library 2.5. This new version sports a brand new design of its administration panel along with two new pieces of functionality: A link search and the ability to show links on multiple pages with navigation links.

Since I had to re-work a lot of the back-end to add these new features, let me know if anything does not work correctly with the new version when you upgrade.

The birth of Weekly Schedule for WordPress

As the fall TV season approaches each year, I am often asked by my friends and co-workers what shows I am planning to watch. Instead of just telling them, I thought that it might be fun for me to have a schedule of shows that I like on my blog.

Since I have been using WordPress for many years to manage my site, my first instinct was to start looking for a plugin to render this schedule. However, as I started to search, I did not find any that had the right look and more importantly, the ability to render concurrent events at the same time on the same day.

Thus, I started designing a new plugin (my third) for WordPress, to render my schedule with some nice jQuery effects for the tooltip and also provide a solid back-end in the admin pages to allow me to easily add and edit shows. After a few weeks of work, I am proud to release the first version of Weekly Schedule.

I hope Weekly Schedule will help some people in their site design using WordPress. Drop me a note here or on the plugin section of the site to let me know what you think of ir you have any problems using it.

Link Library goes up to 2.2

If you’re a regular user of my Link Library plugin for WordPress, you have seen that I have been quite busy with it over the past week and a half. That’s something that tends to happen when I’m on vacation. I get creative and end up doing a bunch of coding.

Version 2.1 released a few days ago added a new option to show edit links on all links when logged as administrator to your blog. Quite useful instead of having to find a link that you want to change from a big list.

Version 2.2, which I just released, adds a new display mode which only shows one category at a time and uses AJAX queries to load other categories based on user input. You can see a demo of this new mode here. As always, you can download the latest and greatest Link Library from the WordPress site.

Releasing Link Library 2.0 for WordPress

I have been working on my Link Library for WordPress plugin for more than four years and always enjoy adding new features to it. While I took a big step when I added an administration interface to the plugin, I also made it slightly more difficult for users to user Link Library to power more than one of their pages with the plugin and configure each instance differently.

In version 2.0, I try to address this shortcoming by allowing users to create up to 5 different sets of settings and then be able to choose which one to use on each page of interest of their site. By still being able to override a few parameters such as including or excluding link categories, the possibilities become endless.

You can see on my own web site two different pages that show output from different Link Library Setting Sets (Freeware Database and Favorite Links). Judge for yourself how efficient this can be. If you have any trouble after upgrading, feel free to drop me a note.

Tune Library goes AJAX

I have always loved working on my WordPress plugins to learn about new technologies. While I am getting quite comfortable with PHP over time, something that I had never dabbled in is AJAX. Thanks to Gary Traffanstedt, who was considering to use Tune Library but found it was lacking some functionality, Tune Library 1.3.1 now offers support for AJAX queries to alleviate requests to refresh pages when viewing different parts of a large music database and to avoid querying all information out of a database. Gary was very helpful in creating an example code base using AJAX and testing out my changes to the plugin. Thanks Gary!

For people preferring the speed of pulling all data off the database in one shot, a non-AJAX query mode is still available.

You can find the latest version of Tune Library on the WordPress plugin web site.

Going a bit crazy with WordPress Plugins

Aftere revamping my site a month ago, updating an old plugin of mine and writing a new one, I decided to take a look at the various plugins out there that could make my life using WordPress even easier than it already is. Here are the plugins that I settled on:

• Collapsible Archive Widget: After running this blog for six years, the monthly archive that the wordpress sidebar widget generates started to be quite long. With this new plugin, archives can be collapsed into monthly and yearly groups.
• Contact Form 7: This plugin is great to easily add a contact page to a site.
• Flexi Pages Widget: Excluding pages that I did not want to see listed in the default Pages widgets started to get really annoying. This Pages Widget replacement makes it very easy to pick pages to display from a list.
• Flickr Manager: After using Flickr manually for many years to host the images that I post to this blog, I found this handy plugin that automates the task of uploading pictures to Flickr and then including them in my posts.
• Google Analytics for WordPress: Very simple in nature, this plugins add the necessary code so that hits on your site can counted on Google Analytics. I installed this one after I forgot to put the code back when I changed my theme.
• Add to Any: A plugin that adds a menu onto my post pages so that you can easily e-mail someone or save off an interesting article that you read.
• WPtouch: A plugin that will display a nicely formatted iPhone / iPod Touch version of the site to people visiting using safari on the these devices.

You might find some of these plugins very useful yourself.

New WP Plugin and a new take on an old one

I have been using WordPress for many years now to manage the content of my blog. I have also been maintaining a plugin called Link Library for it for a long time. Now, I recently went back to the Link Library code and improve it a lot.

I first made it so that you no longer would have to edit page templates to be able to use it. You can now just create a page and write a few keywords in the page body and Link Library will do its thing. I have also added a section in the admin page to configure the plugin output.

I also got inspired over the holidays and created a new plugin called Tune Library. The purpose of this new plugin is to allow users to import their iTunes collection into WordPress and be able to print the list of sonfgs from their library on their site.

I hope that you will enjoy this new plugin and the update to my existing plugin.

Another version of wordpress, another update to Link Library

With the release of WordPress 2.3, I had to make a few small modifications to my plugin. The main one being that they have removed support for link sub-categories. The latest version can be found on the wp-plugins.org site.

Link Library now supports WordPress 2.1

Yes, I am back from another long phase of no posting. Sorry about that. The end of 2006 was extremely busy with all of my travels in my new position as field application engineer.

The back end of my blog has just been updated to the new version of WordPress (2.1).

For those who are using my link-library plugin for WordPress, you’ll be happy to know that I have just updated it to work with WordPress 2.1. I also added a few parameters to the function to show all the links since they removed these parameters from the WordPress admin interface. I have done some testing on this newly updated site and also got a lot of very helpful feedback from Sarah Liberman (thanks a bunch!).

You can download the newest version of the plugin here. I also updated the usage example to show these new parameters. Let me know if you find any issues.

New version of link library plugin

At the request of a user, I have added three new pieces of functionality to my WordPress plugin called link-library. These are:

• Ability to only display links belonging to selected categories
• Ability to display notes in addition to descriptions as opposed to instead of them
• Ability to display link name at the same time as link images

Version 0.2 is now available to download from the WordPress Plugin Repository or can be downloaded directly here.

To help people get started with this plugin, I have added an extra file to download called links.zip. Simply unzip its contents to the directory of your WordPress theme. Once in place, you can create a new Page in the WordPress admin Manage section that uses the Links page template. Once you have your new page, you can just link to it from other parts of your blog or perhaps from the sidebar.

UPDATE: I have just updated the link-library plugin to work with WordPress 2.1. I also had to add a few parameters to the function to show all the links since they removed these parameters from the WordPress admin interface. I have only done basic testing on the plugin at this time and will test more when I upgrade my blog to version 2.1. For those who want to try using it right away, you can download the newest version of the plugin here. I also updated the usage example to show these new parameters.