The Wordpress community is vast. Wordpress is one of the major blog CMS on the Internet. I very much enjoy browsing the Web and whenever I come accross a blog, I find interesting, I tend to check, or at leased attempt to, what plugins are used on the blog. Anyone, who is familiar with the directory structure of Wordpress can check this.

Anyways, the point I am trying to make is - Wordpress succeeded because of its open community and its members’ willingness to share information and plugins. Probably about 50% of the time I attempt to view what plugins someone is using on their blog I am unsuccessful, because the plugins directory, of all the ones in Wordpress, is restricted. Why? I would like to know why do bloggers feel that they need to protect something that is free on the Internet as is. Sharing and promoting the plugins one uses on their blog is a way to show your gratitude to their developers.

As an old school blogger, and one of the first of the just starting Wordpress community, I have always had a page listing the plugins I use on my blog. So, Wordpress bloggers, please allow others from the community to view what plugins you use on your blog. It will make the Web more userfriendly, functional, and it will incourage developers. Thnak you.

Yayeee, finally the Twitter tool plugin for Wordpress, by Alex King, has been updated to add the options of being able to choose the digest post time. The plugin is still in beta, but it still works, and I am happy with it.

The only reason why I found out that there is a new version of the plugin is because I want to tweet (Micro post.) but I want my tweets (Micro posts.) archived. The only way to have the tweets archived is to use the twitter tool plugin, but it does daily digests. I find the post formats some what unapealing, and I really don’t feel like moding the source code to exclude the Twitter digest posts. This resulted in me avoiding Twitter and micro-blogging for most part. For some reason today, I decided to check for a posible update of the plugin, because I was hoping for a weekly digest option. Magically, not only there is a weekly digest option, but I can have both daily and weekly, And I can select the post times for both. If you remember some time ago I complained about how the Twitter-tool plugin would randomly generate the posts, thus missing twets from the same evening.

I am very please with the added functionality and I can also get back to micro-blogging. Thanks Alex, even though you did not respond to my email!

The Twitter Tool, a Wordpress plugin, is an awesome tool. I love that it posts to my Twitter account whenever I make a post on my blog. It also provides me with the ability to make new tweets (Micro posts.) from my blog’s sidebar and from within the Wordpress administrator menu. But the feature I find most valuable is the Twitter digest. The plugin creates a blog post with the day’s tweets, thus creating a back up of my Twitter activity. This is also the feature, which makes me HATE this plugin.

The damn thing creates the digest posts, which are scheduled to appear at midnight with the days tweets, but it generates the posts 4 to 6 hours prior to midnight, right before my active time and thus missing my tweets from the day the post is supposed to reflect. I tried contacting Alex, the creator of the plugin, weeks ago, but I never received a peep from him. I told him about the problem and asked him how can I tweak the code to compensate for this problem, but like I said - not a peep.

It is a love-hate relationship.Unfortunately there isn’t another plugin like it. I guess I will just have to spend the time looking through the source code, line by line, until I figure out how it all works and what needs to be changed to resolve this headache. It won’t be the first time I have had to improve a plugin.

I have 10 invites for web notes service Evernote. Evernote is like ClipMarks, except you can save more that clippings, like images and text, from web sites. Both web services offer a desktop client/web browser plugin, but with Evernote you can also submit clippings from your cell phone.

If you want an invite just leave me a comment. In the form below use the email you want the invite send to.

While looking for plugins for Jutia Group I stumbled upon Latest Posts v1.0. It is on the left side, under “10 Newest Entries”.

I needed some more functionality out of it so I took the liberty to modify the code a bit. Just to make it a tad more flexible.

I started by changing the function call for inside the template. I changed it from:

<?php cypher_latestposts(); ?>

to

<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts(); ?>

What this does is, before the function is called its existence will be verified. This will prevent your theme from braking and your pages loading halfway and then displaying errors when the function is called:

• if you disable the plugin (now you can turn on and off the plugin without the visitors getting page errors)
• the plugin file is moved, corrupted or deleted

In other words, if something happens to the plugin and you are unaware of the problem, your site will not brake. This of course is bad, but it will not have a negative effect on your site.

My next change was to make the number of posts being displayed flexible. With other plugins and the ability to call the function in any page or post you might want to display different number of posts at different places.

I started by deleting the variable

$max_posts

from the global declaration.

Then I placed that variable in the function declaration.

Old

function cypher_latestposts($before='', $after='<br>')

New

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before='', $after='<br>')

Now when you call your function you can set the number of post to be displayed at the function call location. Like this:

<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10'); ?>

In this example I want 10 posts. You can change this number to anything you want.

Here is an extra. Some of you might want to display your links in a list, others separated by a comma (no idea why), slashes, hyphens or as in the original just with a line breaker. So what you will do is change the function declaration like this:
From

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before='', $after='<br>')

to

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before, $after)

When you call your function just insert what you want to separate the links with. Here are some examples:

<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','<li>','</li>'); ?>
<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','+','<br />'); ?>
<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','','/'); ?>
<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','==','=='); ?>