I have today updated the beta available for download to Build 228 and consider this a Release Candidate. No more changes unless for fixing bugs and correcting problems.

Target release date for the final V2.1 including updated documentation - 15th October 2007.

If you upgrade from the previous beta of 2.1 you should just copy the files over the top of the existing ones. Read the Notes that come with it before you proceed - just in case!

When I first started to use WordPress and kept an eye on the support forum, one of the questions that seemed to pop up quite often was ‘how can we assign categories to Pages?’. And the answer, of course, was always that you can’t. It’s not a built in feature and there is still no intention for it to be so.

I tried to fill this need with my old ‘Page Category Organiser’ plugin but it was far from perfect. Multiple or ‘child’ category assignments were not supported for example. Pages did not appear in a category archive list. I was sure I could do better!

The successor to Page Category Organiser is ‘Page Category Plus‘. It still does the ‘organising’ part but it now offers full support for categories as if Pages were Posts. This is why I think that before installing it, potential users should make sure this is what they really want. Pages sharing Post categories? Category Counts being updated? Category Archive lists including Pages?

If that’s what you want then this plugin will, hopefully, fill the need. It comes complete with a flexible ‘List Pages by Category’ template tag as well. Please note however, it is strictly for users of WordPress 2.3.

Someone (no doubt from the USA) asked me in a comment once if knew I had misspelled the word ‘Organiser’. I haven’t. This IS how it is spelt. Only the Americans changed it!

I have today put up 3 new plugins. None of them earth shattering but all, perhaps, useful to some! As is usually the case, all three of these were written initially for my own use but every now and then someone asks if there is a plugin to do that so there is no harm in making them available.

Click Tags: This is strictly for WordPress 2.3 and their new tags implementation. The new structure is good but the WP team have given us no tools to make the management of tags easy. This helps to resolve one of those tasks by displaying a ’clickable’ list of current tags above the tag input field. Mostly useful for people who don’t have an enormous quantity of tags defined!

Paged Navigation: Replaces those ‘previous/next’ links on pages of posts with proper paged navigation controls. This is what I use on my ‘index.php’ and ’single.php’ templates. I find it nice to know just where I am when I visit a site and am browsing through the archives of posts. Simple ‘next/previous’ controls do not tell me that.

Sub-Page Links: Creates an automatic links index of page parent, children (subs) and siblings that can be displayed on all the pages in a ‘group’. I created this for my own plugin pages where I wanted to separate the different components across a page and sub-pages, yet have links to all those on every one of the pages in the group.

Like I say - nothing earth-shattering but maybe of interest to a few.

I have at last put my ‘advanced’ version of my Download Counter plugin up for download. At the same time I have retained the simpler version and renamed it ‘Lite’ - a horrible word but you get used to it!

For all those people who wanted to track the downloads of videos, music files and just about anything else that the ‘Lite’ version didnt handle too well, well now you can.

I have also added much organisation to this version. You can organise your downloads into sub-folders which equate to ‘categories’. Much easier to deal with when you have a large number of them. I should know as am up to over 50 items myself and this new version keeps it much tidier and quicker to find the one you want in the completely re-designed admin panel.

Just beware that if you upgrade to this new version from a previous ‘Lite’ version there ARE some data changes you need to make. it couldn’t be helped. They are fully explained in the Guide that is part of the zip package.

For more information, a list of supported file types and the download visit the plugin page.

I am about to leave my host so over the next two or three days things might be patchy and even disappear for a short while as the new DNS records kick in.

I have been with DreamHost for a couple of years. They seem like nice people and the support team have been helpful and good to me. But I rather suspect that they are suffering from their own success. Sell cheap - stack ‘em high. There is just too much competition for servers and cabling and too often my site loads as if I was back on dial-up. Sadly they have no option between the cheap and cheerful and the dedicated server so I am moving on.

The next couple of days will see things patchy here and, while the new DNS server records kick in who knows? Email may disappear briefly as well. I will be closing down comments in about an hour so that I can start the process of moving my database.

I will also be locking the forum into ‘read only’ mode until things are back to normal.

And all being well, that will be very soon.

[UPDATE: Well one or two little scares but as before I am always astonished at how easy such a move really is. All back to normal I hope!]

A quick look through the support forum will reveal that there is one request that comes up again and again for the future of my Simple Forum plugin - and that is a way to identify which ‘new’ posts a member has or has not seen. A few users have become quite passionate on the subject and obviously think I am stupid for having overlooked such a trivial detail. Many stand-alone forums offer this capability (I understand) so why doesn’t Simple Forum?

Well - there are a few reasons. The quickest is that I have not implemented such a feature but the real reason is that I have not yet found a model that works. And this has been my response every time this has come up along with the challenge that if someone suggests a model that does work then I will look at it and see if it can be done. And that still stands.

But first - I’ll talk a little about the background. A major piece of forum software is a giant undertaking involving lots of people. Because that is all it does they can shape the ‘engine’ any way those people decide to shape it and do whatever they want to do with it. In the case of Simple Forum it is just me, my MacBook Pro and the confines of the WordPress architecture. It was also, as the name implies, intended to be ’simple’! It has become, of course, anything but.

So - I have said it before and I will say it here again so in the future I can just point people to this post and thread. I don’t want to do anything that will bog down the WordPress database and bloat the plugin so much that it slows to a crawl. That’s the first and most important point. Next, consider the following:

If I have 1 forum member and 1 forum post - I need to have 1 piece of data (a switch in effect) to record whether that 1 member has read that 1 post. If I have 10 forum members and 10 posts, I need 100 switches. At the time of writing this, my forum has 120 members and 3008 posts which gives a grand total of 360,960 pieces of data! And this isn’t a busy forum!

So - using this sort of method is not really viable. There has to be another way if only I could find it. What I DO do in Simple Forum, is log the date and time a member last visited, This is not noted at login time or, for that matter, at logout time as most people, I am sure, fail to log out at all when they have finished their visit. It is noted when the system determines that they have not loaded a page for longer that 15 minutes. When this is discovered, the date and time is recorded against their user record as their last visit. Next time they make a visit, all posts made since that recorded date/time are marked as ‘new to them’. But, of course, as they visit or read these posts (if they do and I can’t verify they actually do read them) then the ‘new posts to them’ flag is still set as is their last visited date. How can I make it so that these change as posts are read?

The first and obvious thought is to update the ‘last visited’ date/time in their record to match each post they open as they do so but, of course, this has the effect of removing all the post flags if the first one they open happens to be the most recent of all so this doesn’t work either.

So this is the challenge. Everyone wants it to happen nobody knows how to do it! And when the answer materialises it will probably be easy and it will be one of those forehead slapping moments. The best solutions are always like that. And if you have an idea then please join the discussion and let me know.