I was using Amazon’s Reading List application on LinkedIn and writing short reviews there, but I quite like the idea of having a history of what I’ve read on my own site. There are a couple of “now reading” plugins for WordPress, but none of them really did what I wanted, so I decided to scratch the itch and put something together. 30 minutes later and you can see the results in the sidebar on the homepage! Writing plugins for WordPress hasn’t really changed much since I was active in that area a few years ago, but the main posts table now seems to be used for all kinds of content. In that spirit, I just created a custom post type of ‘book’, inserted some data into the database and wrote a little widget to extract it. Reusing the guid column for ISBNs lets me make use of the wonderful Open Library for covers and the post content just becomes the text. I suppose I could have monetised it with Amazon links, but I’m sure I can live without the 5 bucks that would bring in a year! There’s a little more to do yet, like flesh out a main library URL, and introduce a simple backend page for adding books, but for now it does what I want.

Now I only wish I’d done this years ago, as the list appears pretty thin at the moment! I’ll just take that as yet another incentive to read more!

It might just be the alcohol talking, or end-of-financial-year madness, but with WordPress 3.0 recently out and a couple of requests already this week, I’m seriously considering starting development again. I do have a couple of projects I want to do though, so I only want to dedicate time to Gengo if it’s going to be used. My Japanese has sadly diminished to the point where I’m practically mono-lingual again, so I’m not going to be blogging in multiple languages any time soon, and it would purely be for others to use. So, if enough people email me or comment in the next week or so, I’ll give it a crack. Second time around, I’ll hopefully be able to design it more cleanly and more quickly, and WordPress’ plugin architecture hopefully hasn’t changed too much while I’ve been away.

So if you want to see a new version of Gengo, please let me know. On the other hand, I hear very good things about WPML, so If Gengo’s time has passed, feel free to say that too! I won’t have hurt feelings, promise

It turned out to be a minor error in the Mystique theme, which deals with how CSS classes are assigned to the sections that display the comments. Mystique has the following lines of code at the bottom of its mystique_comment_class function:

$class = join(" ", $classes);
echo apply_filters("comment_class", $class);

Mystique is trying to do the right thing here, by allowing plugins to manipulate the classes with the ‘comment_class’ hook, just like WordPress’ own function. However, the code is turning the $classes array into a $class string and passing that to the plugins. Backtype Connect (and presumably other plugins) expect those classes to be passed as an array leading to the following error:

Fatal error: [] operator not supported for strings

However, because this error occurs within an HTML tag it isn’t rendered correctly, which means it is hard to spot. Nevertheless, it causes PHP to stop executing immediately, leading to half-rendered pages.

Luckily, the fix is simple. Simply join the array after the filter has been called and everything works well. Future revisions of the theme will probably fix this, but in the meantime, you can use the WordPress plugin editor to replace the two lines above in mystique/lib/core.php with the following:

$classes = apply_filters("comment_class", $classes);
echo implode(" ", $classes);

And they should live together in harmony.

You can see the full changelog here and download the latest version here.

The main reason for this early release is a fix to a simple but annoying bug that a few people have encountered. Some reported messages similar to the following appearing:

Warning: initialise_tags(../wp-content/xvalid/xhtml-transitional-10.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /path/to/blog/wp-content/plugins/xvalid.php on line 250

I wasn’t able to recreate this problem myself but have been informed that the fix is a simple one, replacing a ‘require’ with a ‘require_once’. Thanks to Prem for taking the time to get in contact with me and point out the problem and the solution.

There are still a bundle of features I want to add, but finding the time is difficult. I’ll be getting on them as soon as I can, in particular attribute handling, which I think could be done more intelligently allowing for greater flexibility. Thanks to all those people who’ve mailed me with positive comments and found X-Valid useful, especially to those who have given constructive criticism and bug reports. If you have a problem, question or comment, let me know, thanks! You can go get X-Valid here.

Version 0.95 supports the newly released WordPress 1.5 and is integrated into a single menu/plugin file. Unfortunately, it no longer supports WordPress 1.2.x (which ironically means I can’t use it on this blog until I’ve upgraded), but I’ll be working to try and backport a few of the new improvements to the older branch.

The most apparent feature is that of multiple doctype selection. Now you can choose to validate against either the XHTML Strict or Transitional 1.0 doctypes by selecting it from the menu. The menu interface itself has had a few alterations, the internal architecture of the plugin has had some spring cleaning and a couple of bugs have been fixed (Props to Jon Abad for pointing out it was entirely broken in 1.5!).

It now integrates nicely with the Plugin Manager and is One-Click installable. If you want to install it manually, you can get it here but be aware that you’ll have to change some file permissions before it will work.

As always comments, feedback and feature requests are all welcomed. Contact me here.

It’s still in beta but is now stable and handles a wide range of poor markup, converting it to XHTML that will validate against the 1.0 Strict Doctype. For the few cases where validifying the text would involve removing data, the tags are ignored and an information page is generated. You can find it here. Feedback, positive and negative would be greatly appreciated. Hope someone finds it useful!