Planet WordPress

In the infamous words of Bart Simpson, “I didn’t do it.”

I’m not sure what craziness is going on over at Planet WordPress, but I have done nothing to my WordPress feed since December 31st, except perhaps update the site from Subversion. That shouldn’t really have an effect, though, should it?

Perhaps when Planet WordPress starts using WordPress itself we can count on my spamming of it being reduced. Ahem. (Hey, does FeedWordPress work with 2.0?) If Matt is taking volunteers for fixing up Planet, sign me up. Maybe I’ll hit him up at tomorrow’s IRC meetup. At least then I can stop getting the emails/comments complaining about it and Technorati hits on my name with blog posts featuring nothing but a screenshot of someone’s admin spam! Ack!

In case you wanted real WordPress news, you might note that there are new versions of two of my plugins. I did not announce them yet because I was hoping to get a bit more testing by hapless passers-by before everyone else started using them.

EzStatic - Version 3.0 of EzStatic is a pretty good revamping for WordPress 2.0. It will let you run code from inside WordPress posts, just like the Run-PHP and PHP-Exec plugins. It also lets you embed static files from outside WordPress into your WordPress layout. EzStatic is one of the main reasons I wrote the Role Manager at all.

For example, I wrote a simple Chinese Restaurant Name Generator, which runs in my WP root. But you can use EzStatic to make it appear inside my WordPress template. You just change the URL and it’s there.

It’s the same exact file. Yes, when you post forms it works (with a few understandable exceptions, like when you use the same form field names that WordPress looks for to limit posts, for example). Better than having to write a whole blasted application over as a Page Template, don’t you think? Especially since you’d have to do it for every new theme you published…

Geo - Geo required some tweaking to work with WordPress 2.0, and I’m still not convinced they’re complete, so I didn’t bump the version number all the way up. The new version does support some extra features, like outputting the place name if the selected location is one of the stored locations. There are also functions to retrieve that information. And the Google Maps output URL is improved. Again.

If you have useful additions to the Geo plugin, you should email me.

I have some other updates in store, too, but I’m going to hold off announcing them until they’re better tested. Until then, sorry I flooded your Dashboard. Enjoy the Chinese Restaurant names. Yes, I did write that stupid thing just to show you EzStatic.