I never thought I would license a text editor for 39 Euros. After reading quite fantastic reviews of TextMate I decided to give this supposedly divine editor a try. Turned out to be a terrible mistake as I know now.
The first impression was like “OK, it’s a good editor, but 39 Euros while TextWrangler is still free, no way!”.
10 days later I already was knee-deep in TextMate projects, accustomed to its keyboard short-cuts, had the blog-editor configured, let alone all the the bundle-features (discovered the secrets behind FIXME, CHANGED and TODO!!) and was overall very impressed by TextMate’s slick and fast usability. To make a long story short, I couldn’t imagine switching back to another text editor again.
However, TextMate was very helpful today when I changed my blog-theme from my badly hacked and messed up Unsleepable to a clean K2 setup, doing search&replace orgies in my database dumps and WordPress files. K2 is surely one of the best available WordPress themes. It offers an excellent reading experience and nifty features like archive pages sliders or sidebar modules.
Main reason for my clean-up was the migration from UTW to the Simple Tagging Plugin, which I couldn’t get to work very well on my former theme. On K2 it basically works, but for full support (e.g. archive pages) some of the K2 files have to be edited too, not a big problem though. I put the changed files in a zip-file, so if you didn’t modify your K2 installation, just download it and overwrite your existing K2 files.
Simple Tagging Plugin performs better than UTW, comes with built-in features like type-ahead tagging, tag suggestions, related posts and is, unlike UTW, still under ongoing development.
Update
Changed files for K2 v0.9.6 are available here.
Just a quick list of some issues I experienced after I upgraded to WordPress 2.1 Ella:
Insert a link/image into your post won’t work: an old cached version of the Rich Text Editor’s JavaScript file causes the problem. Clear your browser cache to reload the new JavaScript file and everything works fine (found here).
Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW 3.1415926) tags vanish after comments are added to a post: resolved here.
Same happens to GeoPress locations, they disappear after comments are posted. To fix it search for
function update_post($id)
within the file geopress.php and add the following lines right after the opening curly bracket:
if (!is_admin()) return $id;
if (!isset($_POST['addr'])) return $id;
if (!isset($_POST['locname'])) return $id;
(obviously the same issue as above with UTW tags)
In my case those fixes worked perfectly and I’m a happy WordPress user again.
Count me to the people who have updated to WordPress 2.0.1! Without having a closer look at it yet I believe them saying that about 114 bugs were closed. Even including those 114 bugs WordPress 2.0 served my purposes very well.
Once messing around with my WordPress installation I decided to update the other 2 plugins – Extended Live Archives and Ultimate Tag Warrior – as well. If I had encountered any problem updating WordPress or my plugins I would tell you at this point, but there wasn’t any. The whole update-process was just straightforward: delete the old files, keep the customized ones (e.g. wp-content) and upload the new ones.
A bit trickier was the update to beta 1 of my prefered theme Squible. Due to my own modfications and some significant theme changes, you can costumize Squible out of WordPress’s admin area, it took me while to find the right lines in the Squible sources. A side effect of this process was that I changed the layout colors and stripped out all my background images so that this site loads a bit faster now. Some might say the current color scheme is boring, but I think it’s just simple and slick. When I have some quiet time I’ll probably play around with colors and layout and make some changes. But the default page arrangement in Squible is already pretty good and useful I think.
One immediatly noticeable problem with Squible beta 1 is the broken image upload function within WordPress’s write section. Instead of uploading the image the Squible options panel will be displayed where originally the uploading form was, nor will the image be uploaded to the server (see this thread for more information). Both WordPress and Squible are watching for a parameter named “action” with a value of “save”. If not already done this can be fixed by changing “save” to “squible_save” on line 511 and 54 of functions.php.
Still an unsolved problem is the print layout issue. Hints will be highly appreciated!
Update #1:
Along with some other bugs the image upload problem has been fixed in Squible beta 1.1.
A few days ago I found the interesting WordPress Heat Map plugin. It lets you create so called heat maps, like those “occurrence-dependent weighted tag clusters” on flickr or Technorati, of your categories and archives. I think those maps are pretty useful. With the help of them you get a first impression about the focus of the site you are visiting and it allows you to jump immediately to (tag)related content. Tags offer you to find, filter and select content of your interest. Considering the online information overload, tags will become and actually already are an essential help to navigate through the web.
Anyway, since I don’t have too many categories nor do I consider archives significant enough for indexing my content, I took the plugin and modified it slightly. Actually I created an additional function. I wanted to show all my Technorati tags as heat map. The Technorati tags in my blog are added with the help of Bunny’s Technorati Tags plugin to my posts, which does the job quite well. So I developed a function which reads my Bunny’s Technorati Tags and shows them as a heat map. It’s just a small bridge between both plugins.
Feel free to download and use it!
For further information on installation and usage check this website (the plugin was originally done by Christoph). The only difference is that if you want to display your Bunny’s Technorati Tags you have to call the heatmap_bunnytags function like:
heatmap_bunnytags( [your parameters here] );
And if you would like to link to your Technorati-blog-search you should add your blog-url on line 173:
$myblogurl = "http://yourblog.com";
Update:
As you can read in the comments below I installed the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. It’s a very powerful tag administration tool which does tag heat maps among other things.