Once again, I’ve been selected to take part in the Google Summer of Code. This year my aim is to complete the work on the Trac Ticket #6015. In short: Allow plugin installations directly from the WordPress administration interface
As usual, I’ve allready started working on the coding previous to this week, and as such, do have some code to show for my efforts, However, My personal aim is to get an API off the ground for the WordPress Plugin Respositories before releasing any code which could utilise it.
Work so far:
- API: So far i’ve drafted up a first scratch at designing a flexible API which returns the details needed for the search, as well as details for other projects which wish to access the data. It’d be run over a serialized post request the same as the current API’s, My iniial thoughts of objects can be found here: http://dd32.id.au/files/soc2008/pi_api_test2.html i’d appreciate input from others on that, What is missing, Whats needed, etc.
- UI: I’ve not released any code for the UI yet, I’d prefer to get the API implemented and returning useable information ASAP before any UI feedback comes in, This is initially to allow the UI to have access to the data that it needs. (RSS can only provide limited details). A Quick mockup of the UI which relies on RSS details is shown below:
So, List of items achieved this week:
- API Design
- Basic UI design
- Rather large chunk of work on the WP_Filesystem abstraction to fit in with recent changed to trunk
- Looked at a change in UI for the plugins table to fit in better with being able to install a large number of plugins, A Delete/Uninstall option might be needed on the plugins page, As well as seperating it into 2 tables, “Currently Active plugins” and “Available Plugins”. 2 tables does not make much sense in the 2.5 world with people usually only having plugins installed which they need, But with the ability to search and install plugins, a larger number of people may end up with a list of 20 or so plugins which they have available, yet do not use, which could fill the active plugins table up..
And finally:
If you have any input on anything mentioned here within, Or anything mentioned in this Google Groups post, please do leave a comment with your thoughts :)
Whoa indeed!
The New York Nerd » Volcano Erupts During Lightning Storm
Taken in Chaiten, Chile. Update: National Geographic has the story.
This is also my first use of the new PressIT bookmarklet for WordPress 2.6
Last night i moved my email services onto GoogleApps.
Why? well, there were 2 main factors:
- Spam: I get lots of spam, Most have been caught by spam Assasin, But it was really taking a battle with the hoster, I could watch the process list and see myself high on the list with spam assasin scanning email
- Uptime: My current host’s uptime has been all over the place lately, And while not a problem for my WWW, Email is something i like to have reliable service of, Google Apps has been working pretty nicely so far today, Quick POP3 Access(See my IMAP note down below), Archiving of email online, Being able to access it anywhere anytime
What went wrong? Well.. Lots of things actually.
- I broke my DNS.. For an hour last night i had no mail servers, Took me a good hour to work it out too.. Turns out, That if you use shorthand notation in a Bind zone file, you need to put them all together, I tried grouping them(NS, Mail, Web, Other), Which didnt work, i had to group them by server address instead..
- Google’s Email’s IMAP service is broken!, How useful is that, it took me awhile to work out why i was getting 2 emails for every email recieved. Opera can probably work around it by making the Message ID + content a unique value i guess.. But why should Opera do it when its Gmail’s fault? If gmail chooses to show an email in multiple folders, the client is going to follow suit, Why cant they just show the email in one folder? Or use Imap keywords as the linked article says?
- Need a new WWW host, Honestly, My current host is great, Bur.st Networking runs a great service, unfortunately its dieing, Not many people continue to donate, and the load is getting high. This is one of the reasons i’ve moved off them, To ease the load. I’ll continue to host my DNS with them however, Being able to edit my own Zone file directly is great. Any thoughts on a new WWW Host? Dreamhost has been mentioned, Site Ground has been mentioned, And also has NearlyFreeSpeech (However, their pricing is too confusing for me :P) and theres even Ebay advertised hosting for dirt cheap thats likely to be so overloaded, its not even worth considering… However, Their main website loads fast enough.. maybe its hosted on a different server..
Lets see how the next few days pan out.. Hopefully google will continue to perform, Hopefully my WWW will stay up, Maybe i’ll move onto someething new, maybe i’ll end up with a dedicated server, Who knows hey?
(Oh, Dedicated server, I wish i could afford it.. :P)
Plugin Homepage: http://dd32.id.au/wordpress-plugins/add-from-server/
WordPress.org: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-from-server/
Just a quick note to mention that Add From Server 1.3.1 has been released.
New features for this Version include the Ability to Select all files, And French/Spanish Translations, I had to use BabelFish for some of the translations, So apologies if they dont make sense, I do not personally speak either of the languages :)
If anyone has any problems with it,Please contact me via the Contact me link at the top of this page.
Cheers :)
Changelog (for 1.3):
- French Translation
- Spanish Translation
- Select All
- Import files and do not attach to any specific post (Causes it to not appear in the gallery)
Version 1.3.1 includes a small Javascript typo incase you were wondering :)