Nothing But Words

I need to temporarily discontinue offering personal support for my WordPress plugins. I sincerely apologize for this. I’m putting in time nights and weekend at my job – that and my family have to come first. I don’t expect my situation at work to be like this for more than a few more months. In the meantime, please use the comments thread on this post if you have questions, and I’m hoping you can support each other (there are at least a few savvy users of my plugins who have posted helpful comments in the past). I will try to jump in if I can to offer help, but I can’t promise it right now.

Use this post for support questions about Deko Boko, Koumpounophobia, or Post-to-Post Links II.

I just posted a minor upgrade to wordpress.org for Koumpounophobia, which fixes a CSS display issue with the dialog editor. Also, Koumpounophobia and Post-to-Post Links II now include Russian translations, thanks to Fatcow. And Deko Boko has a new Italian translation, thanks to Raneri web design.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.8, and all of my plugins are working fine with it so far. The only problem I’ve noticed is the headers on the Koumpounophobia modal dialogs are no longer styled correctly, but the functionality is fine. If you notice any upgrade-related problems, please add a comment to this post.

And while I’m here: Shashin was one of five image-related plugins (out of the 285 available at wordpress.org) listed in the Weblogs Tools Collection’s article Five Image Related Plugins for your WordPress Site.

(My blog has been quiet recently as I’ve got a big home renovation project going. I’ll post pictures when it’s done. I may not have the opportunity to blog much this month.)

Koumpounophobia is a WordPress plugin that enhances the HTML Editor in several ways, giving you new buttons, modal dialogs, and the ability to add your own buttons.

The new version 0.4 is compatible with Internet Explorer 7 and 8. It also fixes the “scroll position” bug in Firefox 3 (the editor no longer scrolls to the top after you use a Koumpounophobia modal dialog). It’s available for download at wordpress.org.

Getting it to work with Internet Explorer took a lot of research, but in the end it required only a few additional lines of code. The problem was that IE would forget the cursor position in the editor when you used a modal dialog, causing your tag to always be inserted at the beginning of your post. If you do a search for “textarea cursor position” you’ll see a lot of electrons being spilled by others trying to solve this problem for their own projects. I’ll write a separate post on this, as the solution in many cases doesn’t require the dozens and dozens of lines of code that a lot of people are using.

Koumpounophobia is a plugin for adding custom buttons to the WordPress HTML Editor, and it’s now available for download at wordpress.org. I also created a a documentation page.

I’ve made a few improvements with this version:

• Now uses the jQuery plugin UI Dialog for controlling the modal input dialogs
• Fixed bug with buttons for self closing tags that don’t use an input dialog (the button mistakenly tried to add a closing tag)
• Simplified the HTML and CSS for the form input dialogs

If you made your own input dialogs based on the initial release, the HTML needed is now simpler. Please see the dialogs.html in the new version.

If you were using the initial release in conjunction with Post-to-Post Links II, you’ll want download a fresh copy of Post-to-Post Links II as well (not at wordpress.org yet, but it’ll be there soon now also at wordpress.org).

It still doesn’t work correctly in Internet Explorer But I haven’t given up…

Update: Koumpounophobia is now at wordpress.org and so is Post-to-Post Links II. I’ve updated the download links below.

I’m releasing beta versions of two new WordPress plugins: Koumpounophobia and Post-to-Post Links II. I’ll create documentation pages for them soon. In the meantime please see the readme.txt files that come with them for details. Here’s the overview:

Koumpounophobia

Koumpounophobia is powered by jQuery, and enhances the WordPress HTML Editor button bar in 5 ways:

1. It replaces the anchor and image buttons with new versions that provide input dialogs with more options (image width, height, etc.)
2. It adds two new buttons: div and span, each with their own input dialogs (for class, style, etc. attributes)
3. It lets you add your own buttons and create custom input dialogs for them
4. It provides an API for other plugins to add buttons and custom input dialogs
5. You have total control over which Koumpounophobia-based buttons will appear in the button bar

This is a beta release, and since it involves some fairly intricate JavaScript code, browser compatibility is an issue. In my testing so far it works beautifully in Firefox 3 and Google Chrome. It does not work well in IE 6, 7, or 8 (even without Koumpounophobia installed, the HTML Editor has some problems in IE8). I’d appreciate feedback on how it works in other browsers (please leave a comment on this post – let me know your operating system too).

If you’re wondering about the name, Koumpounophobia is a phobia of buttons. I learned about it because my 3 year old has a mild case of it (he won’t wear anything with buttons, and he won’t let you hold him if you’re wearing buttons). I thought the name was appropriate since there haven’t been any improvements to the WordPress HTML Editor in years – someone must be afraid of the buttons

This plugin was a real challenge to create because the WordPress “quicktags” code that creates the HTML Editor’s button bar was not written with customization in mind. It has no hooks for runtime access. This is why so few plugins add buttons to the HTML Editor, while the Visual Editor, with its well documented API, is lavished with attention. Those of us who like to work directly with the HTML deserve some nice buttons too!

Download Koumpounophobia

Post-to-Post Links II

Using the Post-to-Post Links II shortcode in your posts and pages, you can create links to other posts, pages, or categories on your WordPress site. You use the ID number or the slug to identify the post, page, or category for your link. The link will use its title as the link text, or you can supply your own link text. See the readme.txt file for examples of the shortcode syntax.

It makes linking within your site more convenient, and it means your links won’t break if you ever change your permalink structure or re-arrange your categories.

This plugin was inspired by the Easy Post-to-Post Links plugin written (but no longer maintained by) Scott Reilly. Unfortunately though, it cannot interpret the old Easy Post-to-Post Links tags. Post-to-Post Links II uses WordPress’ robust Shortcode API, which is not compatible with the syntax Scott used in Easy Post-to-Post Links. (Update: but you can convert them – see here)

I’m releasing it at the same time as Koumpounophobia because it uses the Koumpounophobia API to register a new button for the HTML Editor. So if you want a handy button for its shortcode, install Koumpounophobia too. Or if you’re a plugin developer, it’s a good working example of how to add buttons to the HTML Editor using Koumpounophobia.

Download Post-to-Post Links II