I’ve been away from fiddyp for a while but not away from wordpress as I’ve been working really hard on some WP based sites that have turned out pretty well using WP as a CMS combined with some useful and custom plugins.

It’s pretty amazing what you can do with some customized templates and a bit of hacking the code here and there so I thought I’d list some of the useful tools I work with to make life a little bit easier.

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Cforms II

This is a really easy plugin to use straight out of the box just by entering <!–cforms–> onto a post or page where you want the contact form to appear.

Select which fields you want in the options page and you can’t get a simpler contact form made on Wordpress!

It can be used in a more complex way too, it has options for AJAX, custom fields and even a file upload function. Get into the code some more and there are ways to generate custom contact forms within the wordpress template code so for example, you could generate a “request more information on this product” form on a product listing which has the product code automatically inserted as a hidden field which will be sent along with the contacts details and message.

You can read more about Cforms II and download the latest version at
http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin

It works well and is constantly being updated with new features and options.
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Popularity: 5% [?]

Sorry if you’re having problems with commentluv plugin, I’ve been having real issues with my nameservers and dedicated server. I’ve moved the feed retrieving file to FiddyP.com now and I think that’s the best place for it.

Along the way of all these changes, I’ve learned not to get a dedicated server from streamline.net

I noticed that my disk usage was over 50GB and I only host 4 sites on my server, I sent them an email asking where this extra space usage was coming from and do you know what the expected me to accept as an answer??? - “that’s space taken up by the OS and plesk”

don’t make me bloody larrrrf. OS using up over 50GB? eejits

turns out it was the log files, fancy that, log files taking up 50gb. doh

Popularity: 5% [?]

Image via WikipediaWe’re now up to 1.7!! I got fed up of ” characters and other punctuation characters getting turned into ? by magpie, also, no display of Chinese or Turkish characters (thanks http://blog.mukispace.com and http://blog.mavikalemler.net/ I used your sites url to test the output of foreign language characters in UTF-8

I moved the determining of the feed location to my server now so the plugin code is a little shorter and neater. Now it should always pick up the feed location from the head of the target site, if it can’t find one there, it searches through the page content for the most likely link to a feed so as long as a feed is linked in the page, it will be picked up and parsed by commentluv.

The plugin itself should be more stable, as long as your blog hosting has the ability to CURL or access external files then it should work. If your hosting wont allow external access to files from within your scripts, be sure to ask them to whitelist the domain www.commentluv.com .

I’m running it on this post from now on so please give it a test especially if you have had problems before or you have a foreign language character set on your site.

Popularity: 5% [?]

It looks like CommentLuv has got over it’s problems and is outputting proper tags for the html and style so that’s good news.

Nobody won the euromillions quicky contest, some came close though! Keep an eye out for upcoming rollover contests…

now I have to get back to paid work… coz that’s what pays the bills!

Popularity: 3% [?]

I have finally completed the code for CommentLuv 1.0

phew! I had a mammoth amount of work to do this week but I got a few hours out of nowhere and I’ve managed to get it stable with these features:

• Options page where you can change
• Text displayed under the comment box
• Text used within the comment
  can choose to show name , site and last blog post
• Choose to enable CommentLuv by default
• Add styling to last blog post text
• Uses an external script to do the fetching
  This means that the magpie library included with wordpress doesn’t get used. Instead I try to curl a page I host on my dedicated server which outputs the last post link. If curl isn’t enabled, it tries to fetch it another way. This way I can keep the most up to date fetching routine on my server and when I update that, all people using commentluv will use the most up to date routine

I will be adding AJAX to it later but for now it is working quite stable, I need to run it on here for a few days to make sure it can behave well and then I’ll package it for a 1.0 release and put ajax in for the 1.5 release…

please feel free to make a comment and test it out for me…. thanks!

[edit]… You can download the beta testing version by clicking here Just extract and overwrite the existing file, there is an options page in the dashboard under “settings” in WP2.5

Popularity: 4% [?]

This weeks round of CommentLuvvers….

http://slyvisions.com/ is a nice looking blog with some interesting unique articles on how to make a bit of money with your blog and the interwebs. I love his slyguy simpson like motif, check it out!

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/ is one of those blogs that makes me feel slightly inadequate due to the fact that Caroline has an absolute tonne of quality content on her site and is an experienced, talented and prolific writer. Just a few minutes browsing her site will increase your bIQ (blog intelligence quotient) and after you get over the feeling of “how could I possibly get to this level”, you’ll go deeper and deeper into her articles and come out feeling inspired to put just a little bit more effort into your writing. Check out one of her most popular posts about using CSS galleries for backlinks and trackbacks

http://bloggrrl.com/This is a site I have browsed by quite a few times and I’m really pleased to see it is now using CommentLuv to great effect. You can read some great stumbleworthy posts such as 8 Signs that you masturbate too much and 8 ways you can spot a real jerk which is a follow up to 8 ways to spot a psycho woman. Check her out!

http://hotfessional.com/ Is a great no-holds-barred, and funny-as-fok site from a “female executive in a mans world”. You can read real laugh out loud posts such as working from home day 1 - “Spending 2 hours trying to hook up a printer to your laptop that has no ink in it sucks. donkey. balls.”. There’s even poetry and a good haiku here and there. A blog that has been bookmarked on my work computer for brightening up the otherwise cloudy days.. definitely my current favourite blog. I must have spent hours on there today, one of the very very few blogs that I have clicked through to the next page after reading the whole first page.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I had one of those eureka! moments in the bath last night, not quite as world changing as the big mans buoyancy formula but enough to get me running to the computer leaving a trail of wet footprints and risking major USB electrocution from my keyboard as I typed in a frenzy to make sure my idea got recorded before it left me like so many cheap women.

I think I might have cracked the blogspot and commentluv issue, as in, a platform independant CommentLuv plugin!! This is something that’s been filling my mind in idle moments ever since the first blogspot blogger to covet the luv contacted me to beg for a blogspot version.

I seem to get at least a couple of emails a week from either blogspot bloggers or typepad users wanting a custom version of CommentLuv so every chance I get (which, sadly, isn’t often) I think about how to make a version that could work with whatever platform it is used on and last night I came closer than ever before to doing just that!… I’ll be working on it as much as I can over the next few days and hopefully have some sort of working version soon

my geekglands are tingling! I tried some external files, javascript, jquery, ajax and all sorts of other things (after I dried myself off and got into my carebear pyjamas) and I seem to have had some small success with comment fields and DOM manipulation. It’s still too early to open the champagne yet but things do look promising!

Popularity: 4% [?]

It seems CommentLuv is enjoying an upsurge of installs again, this usually happens when a big blogger like The Brown Baron, Revellian, Howtospoter or John Cow installs it and gives it a mention so I thought I had better address some (small) issues with it and give it a rewrite.

I’ve sketched out the first draft of the flow chart which is a good reminder in my own mind of how things link together. It’s a chart that will expand further and take up more and more space, from experience I think it will take another 4 or 5 sketches to get the full flow down on paper and then I can take that and refine and expand it to take into account the individual functions and then I can start on the coding proper!

Some things I am going to put in this new version…

• Options Page
  • Change displayed text under comment area
  • Change styling options for last blog post display
  • Change message for last blog post display
  • Option to use external script for blogs with no curl support
  • Setting for how hard the plugin should look for the feed
  • Setting for enable CommentLuv by default
  • Timeout setting for MAGPIE
• AJAX support for background fetching during comment entry*
• Include MAGPIE library in plugin directory**
• Tidy up WP_OPTIONS function for older versions of CommentLuv

* Use jquery to call the function after the comment author URL field loses focus, this will store the authors feed in the cache so when the user submits the comment, the feed in the cache will be used. This will prevent any hanging around after the comment has been submitted while the plugin searches for the feed location.

** Currently, there are some cases of the default include of MAGPIE saving each and every feed cache to the WP database in WP_OPTIONS/OPTION_NAME which tends to make it grow quite large, also some users have reported it being set to “autoload on” which can have an effect on load times. This wont happen if I use a separate MAGPIE include.

So, that’s it, those are my ideas for the new version of CommentLuv. Do you have any suggestions for things you’d like to see?

Popularity: 4% [?]

I keep a track of who installs commentluv by monitoring pings that come in to the plugin page when a new blog activates CommentLuv. I do try and make a comment on each one but some slip through the net due to immense workloads that take priority.
I am taking a bit of advice from Revellian about blogging karma and having a regular spot for linking out to blogs I have seen. What better way to promote CommentLuv and reward those that use it?

The first blog on this list will be Kens Trees, he has a photo blog about his effort to grow bonsai trees from seed. This looks like a blog that has some longevity, it takes bloody ages for a tree to grow so I hope that Ken will keep his blog going for some time while he documents how Willard the Dawn Redwood grows.

Another blog I know you will enjoy is Stephen Hopsons blog, he’s a qualified deaf pilot! Among his posts are some real thought provokers like this one about not giving when you know you should

A great Philippino blog to check out is BendzG, a blog for juicy oriental gossip and much more besides! It’s great to see CommentLuv being used on so many international blogs!

If you have a blog that uses CommentLuv and want a mention, leave me a comment somewhere on any of my posts and I’ll give you a mention in the next CommentLuvvers post. If you want to see more blogs that use CommentLuv, be sure to check the sidebar for the latest people to activate the plugin.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I have finally implemented AJAX into my CommentLuv plugin, it should dramatically increase the speed at which the comment gets posted after a user clicks “submit” by monitoring the comment form entry box, as soon as it gets some action then a javascript routine gets called to find the feed, scrape the last post from it and display it below the comment form.

Because the fetch_rss has a cache which it checks before it tries to open the remote feed, the last blog post will still be stored in the cache from the AJAX request so it wont need to do much at all to add the last blog post to the comment. sweet!

It’s installed and running ok here in it’s rough state so I can see how it performs while I neaten up the code so it can do all the includes and stuff automatically as well as detect another url change if the user changes their blog url after starting to comment.

At the moment it uses a bit of jquery and a bit of the AJAX goodness that you can see on the Beginners AJAX Tutorials posts, when I’ve figured out how to do it all with jquery and have it working nicely then I’ll release the new updated plugin.

It seems that a quiet Christmas morning is all that’s required to get an AJAX problem solved!

I’ll get used to jQuery and get some tutorials out there after the part 5 and 6 are done with the current series. Happy Holidays everyone!

You can always find the current version of CommentLuv here
(no AJAX in the current version yet…)

Popularity: 7% [?]