The Shadowbox JS WordPress plugin has been updated to version 3.0.0.0. This is a large update to the plugin. The majority of the plugin has been rewritten to load only the minimal amount of code needed for either the admin or frontend. New to this release is Shadowbox 3.0b1, programmatic loading of Shadowbox only when needed, selection of which Shadowbox players to load. See the change log for a full list of changes.

There are several important things to take note of:

• PHP 4 Support Dropped
• Additional Skins Removed
• Custom skinning now requires 2 filters, see the FAQ for more information
• The FLV player is disabled by default requiring you to agree to the licensing of the JW FLV Player before it can be used

If you are upgrading from one of the beta releases of this plugin you should use the option to reset to defaults after updating.

For support questions please see http://forum.sivel.net/viewforum.php?id=4.

Recently I attended WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, and took notice of the area of the site that listed all of the Twitter status updates that included the #wordcampmidatl hash tag. In fact a number of people took notice of this feature and thought it was a great idea. Yesterday, Brad from WebDevStudios asked me what plugin was used on the WordCamp Mid-Atlantic site so it could be used on the WordCamp Chicago site, and without knowing of such a plugin I recommended several approaches to achieve the same thing.

I ended up, out of curiosity, writing the functional code to do it and handed it off to WebDevStudios so they could get it over to the WordCamp Chicago site owner. After handing off the code apparently both I and WebDevStudios began wrapping the code into a widget. I chose to take the route of using the new Widgets API that will be introduced into WordPress 2.8.

This gave me some quality time with the new Widget API which, I personally feel, is a great improvement for widgets in WordPress.

I have not yet requested hosting for this plugin on in the WordPress Plugin Repo. So for now the download will remain hosted on this site. For anyone curious about the new Widgets API feel free to download the plugin and poke around. If you have and comments or suggestions for this plugin please let me know! I have just recently started into the world of Twitter and know that with as popular as the service is that this could become a very useful plugin.

On a side note I have added some caching capabilities to the plugin so that in the event that the connection to Twitter fails, as it so often does, it will simply serve the cache from the last successful attempt.

Please note that as this plugin uses the new Widgets API introduced in WordPress 2.8 that it will require WordPress 2.8 to function.

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Michael J. I. Jackson has just recently released Shadwobox 3.0 beta. I have undertaken a huge rewrite of the plugin to both accommodate Shadowbox 3.0 and to make the plugin better overall. The rewrite is nearly complete and already in place on this site. There are many improvements and new features on their way with this new version so please stay tuned. One thing to make special note of, is that this plugin will drop PHP4 support and require PHP5.

Around 10PM EST last night (March 11, 2009) the server that hosts all of the sivel.net domains and FreeMyFeed went off line due to reasons unknown at this time. As of 8:40AM EST today (March 12, 2009) all sites and services are back up and running. Apologies for the down time.

If you are like me, then you are often referring to the function and template tag documentation on the WordPress Codex. My friend, Andy Stratton, got tired of having to open google, typing in the function name and then clicking on the link to the codex returned in the search results. To make his life easier he wrote WPLookup. WPLookup gives you a simple search box that will redirect you to the documentation for the function or if it doesn’t exist, redirect you to the WordPress.org search where you can see documents containing the function or text you are looking for.

To make the service even better you can integrate it into your web browsers search bar for even faster lookups.

I have taken his service one step further and written an IRC bot that is currelty sitting in the WordPress IRC Channel. To use this bot type something in the form of .codex get_pages and it will query WPLookup and return the resulting URL back to the channel.

See the following links for his release announcements about this new service:

1. Find WordPress Function and Template Tag Documentation - Fast
2. New WPLookup Features - Set WPLookup as a browser search engine

I was recently contacted by Nick Stackenburg in regards to my Lightview JS WordPress plugin. It seems as although the license stated that I was allowed to freely distribute the Lightview code, there was a per domain license involved as well. Since I am in conflict with his license I am removing the Lightview JS plugin completely from the WordPress Plugin Repository as all versions have contained the Lightview code.

For the users of my Lightview JS plugin I am recommending that you switch to either my Shadowbox JS plugin or to the Lightview Plus plugin written by Thorsten Puzich. Users switching to the Lightview Plus plugin should purchase the domain license from the Lightview project page.

The Shadowbox JS WordPress Plugin has been updated to version 2.0.3.3. New to this update is additional skins and automatic language detection. See the Change Log for all changes. Enjoy!

The Shadowbox JS WordPress Plugin has been updated to version 2.0.3. Don’t be fooled by the version number. This is a big update. New to this update, by popular request, is an admin interface among other updates. See the Change Log for all changes. Enjoy!

The Moderate Selected Posts WordPress plugin has been updated to version 1.2. New to this version are 2.7 enhancements, admin styling enhancements and localization support. Enjoy!

WordPress 2.7 has been released! No blog post yet from Automattic on the WordPress blog yet, but should be soon.