Last week I finally released Media Categories 1.5, but I neglected to write a post about it. Most of the UI issues have been resolved with the Media Modal, however due tot time constraints I could only ensure the plugins compatibility as far back as WordPress 3.3. It doesn’t break the site earlier than that, but selected taxonomy terms dont save properly. As of now, I have no plans to extend support to 3.2.x or before. ...
I have solved the UI problem in the modal that was holding up the release of Media Categories 1.5. However due to an additional bug reported to me on GitHub Issues, I did not get a chance to test the plugin in earlier version of WordPress. The bug reported was due to an oversight on my part - in my rush to get this out the door, I had hardcoded much of the Javascript and CSS to work specifically for the ‘category’ taxonomy which I meant to go back later and fix - but I forgot. The Media Categories plugin has, since its inception, been intended to be used with any desired taxonomy. Thanks to GitHub user “stvwlf” for the bug report. ...
This week WordPress 3.5 was released, and the core team has made a some great improvements to the way media is handled in the UI. I managed to get my name in the credits for a measly few lines I contributed in a couple of patches - nonetheless I’m proud to be a part of it. The reason I created the Media Categories plugin is because of how neglected the interface for media was. Especially with regard for anyone wanting to add support for taxonomy. In 3.5 media still comes without any taxonomy enabled out of the box (as it should be) - but for those who those who do the custom work of enabling one, the interface is now much improved. ...
For the last few months I’ve been neglecting this blog and my publicly available plugins. Thats because 200% of my time has been tied of in this very large projects - the mySears Community and myKmart Community for Sears Holdings Corporation. This matching pair of Q&A style customer service sites have been migrated from a third-party host known as Viewpoints, and onto a self-hosted WordPress Multi-Site installation. Today I’m happy to say that we’ve launched both. ...
Yesterday a co-worker expressed a need to use the Media Categories plugin with not just a custom taxonomy, but with multiple taxonomies. So I spent last night at the office until around 9:45PM working on Media Categories 1.4. Not to get bogged down in overly technical talk here, since I know that a lot of the users of this plugin are not developers. The main change in this release is that the class is instantiated as an object rather than called statically. All (except a few) references within the class have been changed from static references to objective references. ...
I didn’t have a chance to post about this, but last week I quietly released Media Categories 1.3.1, to workaround a problem which was reported to me on the support forums in the WordPress Plugin directory. A user of the Media Categories plugin explained that some under certain circumstances, categorized media would not save properly. Here are the steps to reproduce the problem: Create two categories with the same name, but different slugs. Open up an attachment while Media Categories 1.3 or below are turned on. (download that version here) Select the two same-name categories, and click save. WordPress will take you back to the Media Library. Open the same attachment again, and click save, without having changed anything. Open that attachment once more. You will find that one of the categories that had a duplicate name, is no longer selected. The first thing I did was turn off the styling on my plugin, which hides a text field that WordPress creates when an attachment has taxonomy support and watched what it did as I went through each of the steps above. This field will take term ID’s, slugs, and names - it can take any number of terms, each separated by commas - but requires the user to manually enter them from memory, which I why I built my plugin. ...
On the heals of release of Media Categories 1.2, which added Gallery Shortcode support, I’m releasing Media Categories 1.3 which allows developers to change which taxonomy is being used. If you’re not a developer, this update won’t be of much use to you, as you won’t be able to write the necessary code to change the taxonomy. Thats not the case if you happen to be a developer making use of this plugin. ...
A few months ago I received suggested it might be a good idea to allow the gallery shortcode to retrieve attachments from a category as part of my Media Categories plugin. So here it is, Media Categories 1.2 extends the native WordPress Gallery Shortcode to allow you to select a category to display via a newly added category parameter which can take either a term_id OR a slug. ...
Yesterday we launched a huge update and redesign of the Kmart BirthdayClub website for Sears Holdings. Not only does the new theme look a lot better, the content is much better organized, and its more usable that it previously was - both from an end-user perspective, and from a content management perspective. Kmart BirthdayClub was originally migrated to WordPress approximately 7 months ago from its previous static and flash-based templates hosted on a WebSphere platform. The site attracted a decent amount of traffic and so some additions were made. The existing theme however was ill-equipped to handle the various new sections of content. The new theme solves most of the usability and information architecture problems that were present in the previous theme, looks a lot better, and leverages jQuery and CSS3 features like gradients, and box shadows to avoid unnecessary flash elements and imagery. ...
Download Category Template Hierarchy Version 1.3.2.1 from the WordPress Plugin Repository This plugin has seen a flurry of bug fixes and updates since 1.3 was released and we’re now on version 1.3.2.1. I am really sorry for having so many updates back-to-back. Everything since 1.3 is bug fixes, here is a summery of what was fixed. category.php templates were not being loaded (somewhere down the line I must have removed it by mistake) In cases where the current category was neither parent nor child, the plugin would fail to load anything from the hierarchy other Lastly, I screwed up a commit, and the changes for 1.3.2 didn’t go out, hence 1.3.2.1 I really appreciate the feedback I’ve received from people using this plugin. These bug reports not only help me make my plugin better for you guys, but also for myself and my job - where every one of my publicly released plugins is being used on production websites. These bug reports and public feedback really help to justify releasing our code publicly when we can, and open source as a whole. ...