Just a quick heads up on what’s been going on with Unwakeable lately. On the top of my priority list is livesearch. Livesearch doesn’t work in Internet Explorer when certain plugins are in use, such as Share This from Alex King. This is caused by multiple prototype.js files being loaded.
The next version of Unwakeable will be 2.0. I’ve been saying 1.3 would be the next version but have since decided to make the bump up to 2.x. I chose to do this because I’m dropping support for WordPress 2.0.x and focusing on supporting WordPress 2.1 fully.
Since Unwakeable 2.0 is a couple weeks out still, this will hopefully give everyone enough time to upgrade to WordPress 2.1. There shouldn’t be anything holding you back from upgrading at this point. As of right now, I’m taking out all the old WordPress 2.0.x functions and replacing them with the new functions found in WordPress 2.1. I really don’t want to try to support both versions of WordPress. Doing so could cause pages to load slowly due to all the checking I’d have to do for existing functions. So, as of right now, Unwakeable 2.0 will be WordPress 2.1 only!!
Also slated for Unwakeable 2.0 is additional support for more plugins. Unwakeable 2.0 will have support for the following plugins, in addition to those already supported:
Also, I should have some additional options for Unwakeable. One additional option will be the number of related posts to show on the sidebar, as well as the number of recent posts to show on the sidebar. Also, I’d like to include an option to specify weather or not to use a fixed width , which is pixel based, or variable width, which is percentage based. This will give greater flexibility to bloggers who post large images frequently. I haven’t looked into how feasable this will be to do yet. Provided it’s not too difficult, this feature should be included in Unwakeable 2.0.
I’m still planning support for user defined color schemes in the options panel, although not in time for Unwakeable 2.0. I’m not quite sure how to go about displaying all these options in an efficient manner. It may be easier for me to just allow users to create custom style sheets that apply only to colors. Not really sure as of right now how I should exactly go about this. This how-to from Thomas looks pretty good, although little of it probably relates to WordPress 2.1.
So, there you have it. I’m really looking forward to releasing Unwakeable 2.0, it’s gonna be the best release yet. Again, I’d like to thank everyone who uses Unwakeable. Your kind words and feedback make every bit of time I put into Unwakeable very much worth it. Thank you all for your support. And as always, let me know if there’s any features you’d like to see or if you’d like support for a certain plugin.
If you’re a Mint 1.x user, you’ll have to pay another $19 to make the upgrade to 2.0. I purchased the upgrade for version 2.0 earlier this week and finally got around to actually upgrading earlier today. The $19 is well worth the upgrade, Mint 2.0 brings many nice new features, like the Bird Feeder pepper for example:
Your RSS and Atom feeds attract all kinds of colorful wildlife, Bird Feeder is a window onto that activity. It highlights subscription trends across multiple Feeds and clicks on individual Seeds. What’s a seed? That’s bird-ese for an article or link within a feed.
Upgrading from Mint 1 was pretty painless, the only thing I’ve had issues with is the Bird Feeder pepper. There seems to be quite a bit of confusion about installing the Bird Feeder pepper. I haven’t really finished installing the Bird Feeder pepper, I don’t want to risk breaking my feeds. I’ve been watching this thread over at the Mint forums for tips. Recently, a forum user linked to a post by Kristin Pishdadi, who has posted a how-to for getting Bird Feeder working with WordPress 2. She spells out step by step what needs to be done to get Bird Feeder working with your WordPress feeds. Looks pretty straight forward, I wonder if it works the same if the WordPress Feedburner plugin is being used. I need to read up some on how exactly that Feedburner plugin works first I guess.
The wp-mint plugin for WordPress should still work fine with Mint 2.0. All the javascript in Mint 2.0 is included in exactly the same fashion it was in Mint 1.x, so that plugin should still work 100%.
So, if you’re having trouble getting the Bird Feeder pepper working with WordPress, go check out Kristin’s post, it’ll probably take care of your problems. It’s a lot more clear about installation than the readme that’s included with the Bird Feeder pepper. The Mint forums are an excellent resource for support issues of all types, check them out if you have problems outside the scope of Kristin’s post.
WordPress 2.1 includes over 550 bug fixes. Might want to start thinking about making the upgrade to 2.1. Make sure all the plugins you use are supported by 2.1 first though, here’s a list of plugins supported in WordPress 2.1.
My Unwakeable WordPress theme doesn’t play nicely with Alex King’s Share This WordPress plugin. When Share This is being used, the livesearch feature of Unwakeable doesn’t work in Internet Explorer 6 or 7. I’m willing to bet K2 has the same issue. I know for a fact that Redoable had this problem at one point.
Livesearch breaks because prototype.js gets loaded twice, first by Unwakeable, then again by Share This. Now, Share This uses the prototype.js that will be included in WordPress 2.1, located at wp-includes/js/prototype.js. We use a custom prototype.js file for Unwakeable. The prototype.js file in Unwakeable will still provide all the functionality needed by Share This.
The prototype.js included in Unwakeable is located at wp-content/themes/unwakeable-1.2/js/prototype.js.php. It has a .php extension because there’s some PHP code at the top that needs processed before doing anything else. The PHP code tells the browser to cache the prototype.js file, it also sends correct content-type headers so the browser knows it’s dealing with a javascript file after all is said and done.
I’ve spent a few days thinking of possible solutions that could be implemented from within Unwakeable. That’s not possible though, unfortunately. Well, it is possible, but would require filtering all the HTML output by WordPress before it’s sent to the browser so we could strip out the prototype.js included by Share This. Doing something like that would probably result in a fairly dramatic decrease in performance, so it’s not an option.
Fortunately, it’s extremely easy to modify Share This to not load prototype.js. Here’s what you need to do:
Open wp-content/plugins/share-this/share-this.php
Go to line 352:
Delete all of line 352 (code above) and you should be left with this on line 351 to line 354
print('
');
Save share-this.php and upload it to wp-content/plugins/share-this/
That’s all there is to do to stop Share This from loading prototype.js. It sorta sucks having to ignore the prototype.js that’s already included with WordPress 2.1. I will probably start working on making Unwakeable work with the prototype.js included in WordPress 2.1.
Does anyone know if it’s possible to determine if a javascript file has been loaded, from within javascript? I ask because I think Share This will still load a second prototype.js, even if I make Unwakeable work with prototype.js from WordPress 2.1 (the one used by Share This already).
I imagine Alex will come up with a method to determine if prototype.js has already been loaded. Unless javascript won’t allow identical .js files to be loaded, in which case determining if prototype.js has already been loaded would be pointless. If that’s the case then I should be good simply making Unwakeable work with prototype.js from WordPress 2.1.
Sorry for the scattered thoughts, this has really been bugging me lately. Anyway, you should be able to make your livesearch work with Share This in Internet Explorer now. This probably applies to most K2 based WordPress themes, but I’m not sure.
The only plugin I’m having trouble with in WordPress 2.1 is the FlickrRSS plugin. Ultimate Tag Warrior also had problems with WordPress 2.1, although I didn’t experience any of them. Ultimate Tag Warrior wasn’t slightly broken, it was trashed, and would delete tags for posts. Here’s what the guys at NeoSmart had to say:
Ultimate Tag Warrior is completely broken with WordPress 2.1 and you can lose all your tags by upgrading to WordPress 2.1. In the more recent SVN revisions of WordPress 2.1, any time a comment is added, deleted, or unapproved, you lose all the tags for that particular post.
Thankfully, Christine, the Ultimate Tag Warrior author, has released a new version of UTW that’s compatible with WordPress 2.1 (I think). I believe the new release implements a fix that was published for the UTW/WP2.1 issue back in December. There still seems to be some speculation over weather or not version 3.1415926 of UTW fixes all the problems with WordPress 2.1. I never had any problems with UTW and WordPress 2.1, even with versions prior to 3.1415926. Sounds like the problem may be somehow related to Akismet from the discussion going on at the UTW forum.
