Tag Archives: projects

Ad Code Manager and Rewrite Rules Inspector

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This is the week of releasing plugins!

Ad Code Manager is a plugin designed to help you deal with ad codes, those short snippets of Javascript used to display advertisements on your website. This week, Rinat Khaziev of Doejo, Jeremy Felt of 10up, and I pushed v0.2, which includes these improvements:

  • Completely reworked user interface, one that now looks and feels like much of the rest of the WordPress admin.
  • Abstracted ad network logic, so you can integrate additional ad networks. Currently, Ad Code Manager fully supports Double Click for Publishers. Pull requests with support for other ad networks are always welcome.
  • In-plugin contextual help to get you properly configured.
  • Priorities for ad codes, which allow you to work around conflicts.
  • An [acm-tag] shortcode for placing ad codes within posts.
  • A widget for placing ad codes in widget areas. Thanks to Justin Sternburg at WebDevStudios for the contribution.

Rewrite Rules Inspector is a simple development tool for viewing all of the rewrite rules registered with your site. It’s been available for VIPs hosted on WordPress.com for a while — today it’s available for download from the WordPress.org repository.

Specifically, the Rewrite Rules Inspector helps you:

  • View a listing of all your rewrite rules.
  • See which rewrite rules match a given URL (and the priorites they match in).
  • Filter by different sources of rewrite rules.
  • Know when rewrite rules are missing in the database by showing an error message.

Both plugins are available for forking in the Automattic Github repo, and pull requests are always welcome. Coming up next are improvements to Co-Authors Plus, P2 Resolved Posts, and a new round of development on Edit Flow…

Co-Authors Plus v2.6.3: Enhancements and bug fixes

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Co-Authors Plus makes it easy to add multiple bylines to a given post, and has full support for custom post types. Out just a moment ago, v2.6.3 has the following improvements:

  • AJAX user search is back to searching against first name, last name, display name, email address and user ID. The method introduced in v2.6.2 didn’t scale well across hundreds of users.
  • French translation courtesy of Sylvain Bérubé.
  • Spanish translation courtesy of Alejandro Arcos.
  • Bug fix: Resolved incorrect caps check against user editing an already published post. Thanks to Doug in the WordPress.org forums for the help.

Please post any questions, bug reports, feature requests, etc. in the WordPress.org forums. If you want to contribute code, I’m eyeballing co-author management in Quick Edit and guest author functionality for v2.7.

For WordPress.com VIPs, this update has already been deployed to the shared plugins repo.

New plugin: P2 Resolved Posts

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On Friday, I finally pushed P2 Resolved Posts live in the WordPress.org directory. Based on Nacin’s gist of the same name, it’s a “lightweight GTD plugin for WordPress and the P2 theme.”

Mark a thread as “unresolved” when the topic needs resolution, and mark it as “resolved” when you’ve achieved that state. There are also sidebar widgets to let you see all unresolved posts, optionally filtered to a specific tag.

We use P2 extensively at Automattic, for a variety of purposes. I improved Nacin’s code last November because I wanted a simple way to encourage the culture of coming to a resolution on a topic. All too often, conversations are left hanging. This is a problem for those participating, and an even larger problem for those reviewing the conversation at a later date.

The plugin is in-development on Github. Please post any feedback, issues, feature requests, etc. in the WordPress.org forums.

Co-Authors Plus v2.6.2: Enhancements and bug fixes

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Co-Authors Plus makes it easy to add multiple bylines to a given post, and has full support for custom post types. Out just a moment ago, v2.6.2 has the following improvements:

  • AJAX user search matches against first name, last name, and nickname fields too, in addition to display name, user login, and email address.
  • Comment moderation and approved notifications are properly sent to all co-authors with the correct capabilities.
  • Filter required capability for user to be returned in an AJAX search with ‘coauthors_edit_author_cap’. This defaults to ‘edit_posts’
  • Filter out administrators and other non-authors from AJAX search with ‘coauthors_edit_ignored_authors’
  • Automatically adds co-authors to Edit Flow’s story budget and calendar views.
  • Bug fix: Don’t set post_author value to current user when quick editing a post. This doesn’t appear in the UI anywhere, but added the post to the current user’s list of posts. See related forum conversation.
  • Bug fix: Properly cc other co-authors on new comment email notifications
  • Bug fix: If a user has already been added as an author to a post, don’t show them in the AJAX search again.
  • Bug fix: Allow output constants to be defined in a theme’s functions.php file and include filters you can use instead.

Please post any questions, bug reports, feature requests, etc. in the WordPress.org forums. If you want to contribute code, I’m eyeballing co-author management in Quick Edit and guest author functionality for v2.7.

For WordPress.com VIPs, this update has already been deployed to the shared plugins repo.

Co-Authors Plus v2.6: Search user’s display names, change byline order and more

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Co-Authors Plus makes it easy to add multiple bylines to a given post, and has full support for custom post types. Out this evening, v2.6 has the following improvements:

  • Sortable authors — drag and drop the order of the authors as you’d like them to appear
  • Search for authors by display name so you can easily add bylines by first or last name
  • Option to remove the first author when there are two or more listed
  • More reliably generates the published post count for each user

Thanks to those in the forum who provided feedback and special thanks to Russell Heimlich for his contributions with sortable authors. If you feel like giving back, there are a few tickets open we’d love patches for. In particular, guest bylines would be pretty neat. I have a possible direction you can go if you’re looking for inspiration.

For our WordPress.com VIPs, this release will be available in the shared plugins directory in just a moment.

Notes from livecoding the ONA11 website

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This is a quick post I’ve been meaning to do about the work we did this year on the ONA11 conference website.

Background: last year, I was late on getting a conference pass and ended up volunteering for an entire day in the student newsroom. ONA’s student newsroom produces stories, video, and other coverage related to the conference. I had so much fun that I volunteered to do it again this year. I planned to work on it over the summer, but 90% of the work ended up being done in the last week.

The goals for the website varied depending on the context:

  • Before the conference, the focus was convincing journalists to purchase tickets and attend.
  • During the conference, there are two audiences: those who are physically at the sessions and those who want to participate virtually. The former probably want a backchannel for conversation and capturing the highlights, whereas the latter probably want to participate in realtime as much as they can.
  • After the conference, everyone wants to access a historical archive of the content presented in sessions, either to catch those they missed or find the link they heard referenced.

With this in mind, we worked on making the website dynamically reflect these needs. It was helpful, although somewhat distracting from the experience, that I was working on the website during the entire conference.

What worked this time:

  • Session pages as a custom post type. This gave us a structured database of all sessions and allowed us to easily build a session listing, etc.
  • Using Posts 2 Posts to associate posts and presenters with session pages. Our realtime curation crew could easily publish content from the WordPress admin, associate it with a session, and have it automatically pulled into the session page. Furthermore, every presenter had a dedicated profile page and their information could automatically be pulled into other contexts on the website.
  • Auto-showing the livestream player on an individual session page based on timestamp. Every session was associated with a track and I had a bit of logic to pull in the correct livestream based on current time, session start, and session end.
  • Showing the session updates in reverse chronological order during the event (because the user is most likely refreshing the page and wants the most recent updates at the top) and then flipping to chronological order 15 minutes after the event.
  • Leveraging the Zoninator on the homepage for featured stories and events. Editorial loved that they could have full control over which stories were highlighted. WordPress normally lists headlines in reverse chronological order, and developers hack this with “featured” categories, etc.
  • Post formats presented content exactly as it was intended to be presented. I was particularly proud of my gallery implementation, even if there weren’t the visuals to go with it.

Next time I’d like to:

  • Get started earlier so these features are actually fleshed out before the day of.
  • Build an interface for posting updates from the session page so it’s brain dead simple to update (no associating with session post, choosing post type, writing a title if you don’t need to, etc.)
  • Allow for “featured” session updates a la NY Times Editors’ Picks for commenting.
  • Guest session update submissions with a moderation queue.
  • Live update the session page so it’s essentially liveblogging with rich media.
  • Show the bylines/avatars for people covering the event, so you know how well it’s going to be covered (e.g. one person versus five people participating)
  • On the all sessions page, show the number of updates an event has, whether it’s currently live/being livestreamed, etc.
  • Order content on the single session page based when it was published (e.g. you can assume everything 30 minutes after the session is coverage of it, whereas during the event is realtime updates on it).

Lastly, I have one more idea I’d like to pitch: a way of indicating who you want to meet at the conference. Every attendee that registers get access to a page on the website listing every other attendee. Then, they can go through and indicate whom they want to meet at the conference. It’s a double win; you get to notify who you want to meet that you want to meet them, and you get to see in advance who wants to meet you.

For archival purposes, I’ve captured a gallery of screengrabs from the website too.