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.

With the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and the high number of questions I have been fielding about Shadowbox.js not working under the newly released IE8; I figured I would work on a hack that would allow the Shadowbox JS plugin to work with IE8 until Michael J. I. Jackson releases a version that natively supports IE8. I intend on releasing an update to the Shadowbox JS plugin soon to include IE8 support. Stay tuned for the release.

The Shadowbox JS WordPress plugin has been updated to version 2.0.4.1. New to this version is Internet Explorer 8 support by way of the X-UA-Compatible meta tag. This hack is disabled by default because…well…it is a hack. To enable IE8 support visit the Shadowbox JS settings page in the WordPress admin and set ‘Internet Explorer 8 Hack’ to ‘true’. Enjoy!

The Shadowbox JS WordPress Plugin has been updated to version 2.0.4.0. More big changes in this version. Now using domready events for all javascript libraries other than ‘None’ for initialization of Shadowbox.js before the site is completely loaded, support for custom shadowbox.js skins by use of a filter and numerous other changes. Check the change log at the link provided. Enjoy!

The Page Restrict WordPress Plugin has been updated to version 1.6. New to this update is a meta box for easy restriction on the write/edit page pages, restrict viewing comments on restricted pages and restrict page content in search results. Enjoy!

The Public Post Preview WordPress Plugin has been updated to version 1.1. New to this update is not limiting public previews to posts in draft or pending status. The plugin now allows public previews of any post that is not in ‘publish’ status. Enjoy!

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.

I am releasing updates to 4 of my plugins today. The plugins that have been updated are AJAXify FAQ-Tastic, Moderate Selected Posts, Possibly Related Recent Posts and Lightview JS. The most important updates to these plugins are PHP Notice fixes and enqueue-ing scripts and styles that were previously just printed to the head. You can see each plugins respective change log at the links provided. Enjoy!

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!