It started with a bug in WordPress 2.2 that meant not only edits to a page triggered an update to be sent but also a new comment being left. If you left the ’send email notification to subscribers’ toggled on, some unwanted email was being sent. So it was time to re-write it.

The big news is that it now works with Posts. It amazes me that anyone would want it to but yes - I have been asked for this so often I have now supplied it. And the method of marking a change for update emails to be sent is now simply made in the actual Write Post and Write page screens with a simple little checkbox!

For ful details: Post/Page Update Notification Plugin Page

I have tonight upgraded the forum plugin on this site to an alpha build of 2.1 - mainly to start to test out the new stuff but also to ensure that the bug fixes that have surfaced are locked down. But it’s the new features that I am quite excited about two in particular.

The first is a new sidebar template tag that lists the most recent posts. It’s different to the current one because the text that gets displayed is configurable by the user. But also it gives the option to use AJAX (well it’s AHAH really) to refresh itself so anything new coming in can be quickly noticed.

The other main new feature is the cross linking of blog posts to a forum topic. This works both ways allowing a blog post to create a new topic in the forums or the other way around. This is something I’ve been wanting to make a start on since the beginning of the project and at last it is starting to materialise.

And a few other ‘goodies’? I have optionally added the ‘math spam’ to user registrations. Since I did this on my site here, rogue/spam registrations have dropped from about 120 a week to about 2 so I am delighted by this. There is also a new option to not use the math spam when an admin or moderator is posting which sort of made sense. MSN Messenger IS is a new option in the user profile as well as the ability to view all topics to which any member has posted.

The rest are bug fixes - many of the them embarrassingly stupid and some very important so the small feature set is now fixed for 2.1 so that the bugs can be tested out so as to get this into the field as soon as possible. Thanks to all the people using this for their suggestions, requests and for catching the problems and letting me know - usually in a most understanding way.

Many users of my Download Counter plugin have, in the past, requested that it support video, music and other media type files. Well the good news is that I now have a pre-release ‘advanced’ version up and working - in use here on my site as it happens - that now supports a long list of file types. It also supports categories with parallel sub-folders and paging of the download file list as well as list filtering.

The downside of this is that the current data anyone has built up wont work with this new version without some editing. A pain I know but that was the price. It took me about 8 minutes to convert my list although that’s only about 38 download entries. I could have done it much quicker editing the database directly however!

I am looking for anyone interested in helping test this new version. I have not found any problems yet on my own site but it could do with a more complex set of test data including some media file types. If anyone is interested then please use the Contact link on the About tab on the sidebar and let me know and I can send it along to them.

Database Errors on Install/Upgrade:

A few people have had problems installing or upgrading Simple Forum version 2 and have seen it fail to create and alter tables. I shall explain!

As from WordPress 2.2, the WP team decided that in future, the WP database would be created with a default ‘charset’ of utf-8. if you don’t know what that is no matter - but consider it a good thing! In keeping with this new standard, I set the new tables required for Simple Forum to also be utf-8. However, it appears that some older version of MySQL, still out there on hosts unwilling to upgrade, do not like this instruction and fail to create the tables. My apologies for this - I had no idea this was the case.

To remedy this, I have added to the plugin page a separate download of the install and upgrade scripts. if you see this problem then please download the zip and overwrite the two files in your simple-forum plugin folder with these replacements. All should then be well.

Other Bugs and Problems:

As errors come to light that are important enough to warrant a fix, I will do two things. I will update the main zip download with the fix so that anyone taking the plugin after discovery will not be effected. I will also add to the error patch that is available for download so that existing users can also take the patch and error fix. I will also add a topic to the Simple Forum V2 announcement thread detailing the nature of the found error.

Hopefully that will keep users up to date.

I am finally releasing the version 2.0 update to Simple Forum. Please note that there are some notes that are important to be read before installing that are distributed with the download package.

Main feature list of this update are:

• New ‘All Forums’ search capability
• New forum ‘QuickLinks’ dropdown
• Added Members Search (all topics they have posted to)
• Admin can pin and lock topics/pin posts at creation time
• RSS Feed for ‘All’ public Forums
• Avatars folder has been moved - (see important notes with download)
• New template tag: sf_forum_dropdown()
• Added optional forum statistics strip
• New option to not display Login/Logout and Register icons
• Add your own filters (add_filter) to post save/display
• New option to show new post list above groups/forums (front page)
• Updated TinyMCE to Version 2.1.1.1
• Extra validation and data integrity checks
• Major revision to all skin CSS files
• Improvement to Error and Success Notification system
• URL construction - revert to home-grown routine (for valid XHTML)
• New Post links now go to correct post on correct page
• Page links in Recent Post List corrected
• Corrected search topic paging inaccuracies
• Corrected user Profile View avatar display
• Corrected User Edit failing when not on first page of posts
• Corrected localisation of Last Visited/Posted Date display
• All buttons should now work in IE7
• Re-coded Admin Options to use much less code

But actually changes, clean-ups, optimisations etc., are far too numerous to mention.

For full details: Simple Forum plugin page.

I had two reasons for outting out a quick update to this plugin. The first were a couple of people telling me that the admin buttons didn’t all work in Internet Explorer 7. The other was my own realisation that if you had very long download url’s, the admin page was too wide to fit on the screen!

So both of these have been corrected in 1.2, with the Admin screen taking on a new look.

For full details: Download Counter plugin page.