Fixed incorrectly shown number of WordPress posts (incorrect mysql query),
Resolved jQuery compatibility issue,
Improved stylesheet mechanism. One external global stylesheet + embedded one for a custom animation. Additional css selectors for easier modification.
Modified settings page,
Ability to add thumbnails and excerpt (lots of users requested this!),
Custom notification for pages with a shortcode [upprev]Sample Text[/upprev],
Disabled PHP errors notification for a javascript file.
Check it out on this page (by scrolling down) and then use the plugin update feature on your WordPress site or download a new copy from the WordPress repository!
I’ve been struggling to upgrade my WordPress site for some time now.
I couldn’t download plugin updates, let alone install the latest version of WordPress without using a plugin like WordPress Automatic Upgrade. That plugin throws WordPress into a fancy maintenance mode, so you can go about your upgrading business. It works well, but it’s not meant for making quick plugin upgrades.
The final straw came today, though, when after manually updating a handful of plugins, I was unable to reactivate all my recently activated plugins. I tried activating them all at once and when that failed, I went in batches and finally, one by one until almost every one was turned back on. When I finally got most of my plugins going simultaneously, I faced another conundrum—couldn’t see any content on the plugins.php page on my WordPress backend.
Update 10/12/2010: WPEngineer published a great article on WordPress memory limit issues today.
Prior to all these shenanigans, I had also given up on trying to activate the Scribe SEO plugin along with any other plugins due to it triggering a fatal error claiming lack of memory. Although inconvenient, at least this issue had an error dialogue and provided a clue. I figured all the other plugin issues were related to this memory issue, as well.
I did a quick Google search to try to understand memory issues as they pertain to WordPress (and more importantly, how to get around this on a shared host). One forum explained that this was actually called a PHP memory limit.
I had dealt with this issue once before—a long time ago—back in my WordPress salad days. At the time, the PHP memory limit set by my work’s webhost was crashing my first WordPress site several times a day. Since I knew very little about WordPress then (or any kind of web development, for that matter), I never did figure out a good solution to keep that site from going down. I think I just ignored the downtime as best I could and passed the buck when I moved on to a new company.
Anyway, this time I had the benefit of four years WordPress and development environment experience. After learning a bit about PHP memory limits from the forum I mentioned, I checked to see if any plugins could solve my issue. It was a long shot, but I did find a plugin, WP Overview (lite) Dashboard Memory Bump Usage, that allowed me to see my site’s memory usage and limits.
So after seeing the numbers in front of me (32MB available, 31.3MB used) and making a final attempt at changing the values through CPanel, I was finally ready to submit a support request. When I finally contacted WPWebHost to see if they would up my PHP memory limit, of course they said yes. Within 10 minutes, I was ramped up to 64MB, my plugins page was working and I even activated Scribe, the plugin I originally gave up upon using.
I have to say, that it’s very cool to see everything working on the backend of my WordPress site. I bet I could even update my plugins and upload images to my posts without bringing down the whole site, too. So if you are having issues updating your site, contact your webhost. You may have a very low PHP memory limit that only they can change for you.
Our expert jQuery programmer, Grzegorz Krzyminski, has created a WordPress Plugin to emulate the “Next Post” buttons you see once you scroll to the bottom of New York Times web articles.
UpPrev has been updated to V1.4. There’s a boat-load of changes, so you should update accordingly. Subscribe to our RSS feed to learn when additional updates occur.
New York Times “Next Post” Animated Button Examples
Just like the NYTimes button, upPrev allows WordPress site admins to provide the same functionality for their readers. When a reader scrolls to the bottom of a single post, a button animates in the page’s bottom right corner, allowing the reader to select the next available post in the single post’s category (the category is also clickable to access an archive page). If no next post exists, no button is displayed.
The plugin’s only current option is choosing a fade-in or a fly-in animation.
It’s absolutely beautiful. I love Grzegorz’s work and I invite you to download the plugin in the WordPress repository.
Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at OfficePort Chicago for the official 1-Day WordPress Workshop. This event seems to be sold out but hopefully, there will more workshops in the near future for those who can’t make it.
My topic list includes WordPress themes and plugins, so I thought I could provide a list ahead of time of some links we might use during the discussions.
First, they revisit old territory with a semi-dis to Automattic and their alleged third-party commercial cock-blocking, then the announcement of WPPlugins, the supposed app store for WordPress plugins.
Is this goodbye to free [quality] plugins? Maybe, but if this service is to catch on, it’ll take six months to a year for real adoption, so no need to freak out just yet.
The major problems WPPlugins face are: 1) plugin developers haven’t seemed to be very commercially oriented in the past, so I’m questioning if the best and most well known devs will switch over now and 2) WordPress has been in development for almost five years and thousands of free plugins have already been released. If the business strategy really wanted to succeed, it would have had to have been to the market long before 98% of the WordPress plugins ever to exist were already created.
I guess we’ll see, but I can’t see why a developer wouldn’t want to monetize their work. This WPPlugins deal seems incredibly fair. I haven’t read the exclusivity fine print, but Incsub, the company behind this project, as well as the better known (and personally loathed) WPMUDev Premium project, only gets 10% of each sale or plugin subscription.
If the service came out a year or two ago, I would predict nothing but great success, but now, who knows? I have a feeling that the biggest predictor might be the adoption (or download) numbers of WordPress in general. If they’re rising, then the market is getting larger, which means quality (and more importantly, dependability) will begin to become more important to the “average” WordPress user. And not surprisingly, average users do equal value with price, hence their aversion to open-source technologies in the first place.
Our WordPress plugin, upPrev, the New York Times-style jQuery-animated previous post flyout box, has been updated to version 1.4. Here are the major changes:
