Monthly Archives: March 2006

TinyMCE 2.0.5 and Spell Check

TinyMCE 2.0.5, including the new spell checker, is in WP trunk. We auditioned this on WordPress.com for awhile and received lots of positive feedback. Over the history of WordPress, the number one most requested feature is WYSIWYG editing. We added that in 2.0 when we incorporated TinyMCE. With that down, the number one request became spell checking. A spell checker is a make or break feature for many people. So, here it is.

(This post not spell checked because I am a hard core. I dare you to find a single mispeling on this page.)

More AJAX in the Admin

Thanks to Michael Adams AJAX is featured in more places in the WordPress admin. We use AJAX primarily to avoid page reloads when manipulating lists. When deleting posts, pages, categories, comments, or bookmarks, you will see the deleted object fade out of the list and vanish. No reload required. We do this in a few places in 2.0.x, but now we do it more comprehensively. See this tracking ticket for details. This change will be available in the next release of WordPress. Right now you can get it only by pulling the latest development bits out of the subversion repository.

And, yes, the admin pages degrade nicely when using less capable browsers. I can still administer my blog using my BlackBerry.

The Appliances Are Watching

I am surrounded by electronics in my home office. Something has been beeping intermittently all night, and I can’t tell where the beep is coming from. I started turning things off and still the beep persists. I’m getting concerned. :-)

The Ghost Brigades and Other Recent Reads

I recently finished John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades. Ghost Brigades is his usual can’t-put-it-down goodness. I’ll forego an attempt at a capsule review and simply recommend that you get it, read it, and enjoy.

I also enjoyed Jonathan Carroll’s latest, Glass Soup. You have to have a taste for Carroll’s quirky style and fanciful plots. I do and enjoy all of his books.

Already Dead is the first of Charlie Huston’s novels that I have read. I’m going to investigate his other titles after reading this. Already Dead combines some of my favorite fiction genres: hard-boiled crime noir, urban fantasy, and vampires.

I recently updated my Recent Reads list to use those nifty Amazon Product Preview links. I like rolling over the links during my nostalgic trips through my past reads and seeing the book covers pop up. I also like it when Amazon gives me money. :-)

Cron

Owen and Robert have put together a nice cron implementation for WP.  Internally, this is used to schedule future posts.  It is also available to plugin authors who want to be able to schedule events.  Check out the in-progress API.

It’s the Little Things

WP contributor “random” spotted a couple places where some small bits of code were causing slow downs disproportionate to their size. random provided patches for ent2ncr and smilies that resulted in a nice performance bump. Small code cleanups like this can have big results.

BlackBerry 8700c

After several proddings from Matt, I picked up a BlackBerry 8700c. I’m usually not too keen on such devices, but I rather like the UI and click-wheel on the 8700. I especially like the fact that it is still usable as a phone. The address book is very accessible, and I like the layout of the call log. Calls are clear, and the speaker phone is pretty good. As for the net functions, I can read my email fairly efficiently and even blog (this post was written on the BB’s web browser). I’ve found that I actually use the task list on the 8700, something I often disregard immediately on other devices. And as a nice bonus, Google Local for Mobile really kicks ass on this thing.

The main draw for me is the keyboard, click-wheel, escape key input combination. They interact very nicely with the UI and are loaded with nice conveniences. I can actually use this thing. The features and the speedy EDGE network mean nothing without usability.

On the downside, this will be yet another chain enslaving me to the WordPress.com servers. Curse you Matt. :-)

WP Commit Digest for February 2006

WP development has been very active since 2.0.1. Much work is going into improving WP’s Page handling to make it a better CMS. WP has allowed one to manage both Posts and Pages for some time now. Pages, however, are missing some of the work flow control that Posts have. Posts can have a status of “publish”, “private”, or “draft”. Due to the way Pages were originally slipped into WP, they could only have a status of “publish”. No longer. We restructured things quite a bit so that Pages are now first class citizens that have the same workflow as posts.

Another major restructuring effort involves how we handle publishing future posts. We now use a psuedo-cron system to schedule posts for publication rather than relying on our post queries to exclude posts with publication dates that fall after the current time. This makes our queries faster and adds some handy cron API that allows plugin authors to do fun cron-y things. Owen has the gory details on both pseudo-cron and the improved Page handling.

While improving the Page workflow, we also fine-tuned the Page capabilities. Page capabilities are now cleanly separated from Post capabilities, and new delete capabilities control deletion of both Posts and Pages. These were added to enable better access control for those writing Wiki plugins. Wiki users should be able to edit and publish pages but not delete pages, and they should be unable to touch posts at all. The added caps allow plugin authors to setup Wiki-like editing roles.

A small change that will have many rejoicing is the addition of paging to the Page Manager. Yes, we’re lame for not having this before, but now we’ve got it. I was holding off on an adding this until the Page rework mentioned above was done so that we could do this cleanly.

Links management received a thorough overhaul. The rather complex Link Categories page is gone completely, and the Link Manager is pared down and simplified. The Link editor features the collapsible, draggable boxes used in the Post and Page editor, and the backend link code received simplification and prettification as well. On top of all of that, Links are now known as Bookmarks. We’ve been meaning to update and cleanup Links Bookmarks for several releases and at last it is done.

A feature that just landed today allows any Page to be used as the front page in place of the usual blog page. You can display your About page as the front page and move the latest blog posts to a Blog or Journal page. Any of your Pages can be used as the front page or the blog page.

And, of course, we have the usual variety of bug fixes. There are always bugs to fix.

Update: Screenshots