Donations Clouds 0.1.1
Alex Günsche · May 7, 2008
The WordPress plugin Donations Clouds is available in version 0.1.1 which fixes some minor bugs and adds widgets capability to the plugin.
Archive for the ‘[lang_de]Software[/lang_de][lang_en]Software[/lang_en]’ Category
Donations Clouds
Alex Günsche · April 17, 2008
Your website has cool stuff and encourages people to donate for it, but nobody ever gives a penny? Give them something that they get only for a donation, e.g. a link on your website. However, maintaining a link list is tedious, and it’s not really appealing. Therefore, we are proud to present the donations cloud (similar to a tag cloud) concept along with an easy to use WordPress plugin. Read on to learn how you really get some donations, and how to go about it with your WordPress blog.
Polyglot editor integration in 5 minutes
Alex Günsche · March 19, 2008
Polyglot is a great WordPress plugin by Martin Chlupac, which allows WordPress users to offer multilanguage versions of virtually any content. (I’m using it on this website, too.)
Unfortunately, Polyglot lacks a quite important feature: A proper integration into the WordPress editors, i.e. TinyMCE and Quicktags (The buttons above the editor which you see when WYSIWYG is deactivated). I’m certainly not the first to notice this problem, but I might have been the first to create a proper solution. 
Here you have it, code and documentation in a little package:
polyglot_editor_integration.zip
polyglot_editor_integration.tar.gz
(Follow the instructions in the file HOWTO. Note that the TinyMCE integration is based on TinyMCE 3, hence it requires WordPress 2.5 or higher. If there is enough request, I might also create a TinyMCE 2 solution.)
Integrate Polyglot with your WordPress editors. It’s just a matter of 5 minutes!
Have fun with WordPress SVN
Alex Günsche · March 6, 2008
Many people would like to try the very latest WordPress developments, which are usually available via the WordPress SVN server. But not everybody is able to use SVN, and of course nobody will bother to scrape the files together via the the web SVN interface.
So I’ve set up a little script on this server that will create a package of the latest SVN code once an hour and make it available for download. The files will be found under the following URLs:
http://www.zirona.com/download/wpsvn/wpsvn.zip
http://www.zirona.com/download/wpsvn/wpsvn.tar.gz
http://www.zirona.com/download/wpsvn/md5sums
http://www.zirona.com/download/wpsvn/current_revision
The packages are to be installed just as a regular WordPress package. You can also use it to upgrade an existing WP installation; note however that it’s not recommended to run development code on production sites.
You can download the script itself, too:
http://zirona.com/download/wpsvn/wpsvn.sh
Enjoy!
Btw, if you just want to see the latest WP without installing it, you can view the development version (especially the admin area) at Chris Johnston’s test site.
P.S. (06.03.2008, 15:40 CET): I just learnt that you can download a trunk snapshot from WP Trac directly. Therefore, this service appears a bit needless now. Anyway, I’m keeping it online; it doesn’t hurt me or my server, and maybe it serves a purpose for somebody.
InstantUpgrade video
Alex Günsche · February 12, 2008
How cool is that! Jim from The Kaizen Business has created a screencast of a WordPress upgrade with the InstantUpgrade plugin and posted it on YouTube. Enjoy! 
InstantUpgrade: 1.0 beta
Alex Günsche · February 11, 2008
Changelog for this page:
- 14.02.08, 00:16 CET: beta2 uploaded, download links updated.
- 15.02.08, 22:07 CET: 1.0 beta2 has now been put on the official Instant Upgrade page, v0.2 has been moved. This page is now obsolete.
- 16.02.08, 10:44 CET: Moved the comments to the new page, too.
The popular InstantUpgrade plugin has become one of the most popular WordPress plugins — even though it is not too easy to use. The next version of InstantUpgrade will hopefully be as popular as the current one, but it is much easier to use!
How come? InstantUpgrade does now offer the possibilty to transfer files via FTP, with the blog owner’s FTP account data. So, you do no longer have to make all WordPress files writable, and you don’t need a chmod procedure once you want to get rid of the plugin. Simply insert the FTP account data, and you are ready to upgrade.
Attention: This version of the plugin is a beta release. If you want to play safe, please use the older, but extensively tested version. This beta release is for experienced users!
Please note: Upgrading a web application is a critical task. Of course we did our best to create a stable and careful software. Still, please be sure to have working backups. If you encounter problems with this beta version, leave a comment on this page. Please consider coming back for a donation. You’ll support our efforts and receive a backlink. Have problems unpacking archives? Try the latest 7zip. As soon as the plugin is installed and the configuration is done, you can go to Manage » InstantUpgrade and perform the actual upgrades. Please: If you use this beta release, come back and tell us if you were successful, and if not, what errors you encountered. Thank you.
Installation
Download
Money, money, money
Alex Günsche · February 4, 2008
Developing decent software is very time consuming. Software development is not only programming, but it’s also thinking, trying, testing, rejecting/reimplementing, discussing, researching, supporting, bug fixing. It’s a whole lot of work! Still, we love to give them away for free. However, as software development takes time and effort, you might want to donate some money, if you got a valuable piece of software for free.
Donate and get a backlink
Well, here’s a deal: You continue having fun with our plugins, downloading them for free, sharing and modifying them. However:
If you like our software, please consider coming back to donate some bucks via PayPal. If you do so, you will not only raise our motivation to improve our free tools, but you will also get a backlink to your website. Simply submit a donation via the form in the upper right of this page, and your will be automatically added to the donations cloud! (Please also read the information behind the link “How does it work?”.)
A big “thank you” goes to easywordpress for this simple yet fine idea, and especially for the first donation we’ve ever got for our plugin work. If you are a developer yourself, you might want to have a look at the Donations Cloud plugin for WordPress.
Watch out: “Share this” plugin monitors your blog and your visitors
Alex Günsche · January 29, 2008
The popular “Share this” WordPress plugin monitors your blog and your visitors. Each time a visitor calls a page of your website containing the Share This widget, they will download a so-called webbug. It’s the image at the bottom of the Share This widget.
Although the unique identifier of the webbug is generated randomly (something like 775e8ba2-8ea3-48a9-a071-6ebdd986d676) on your blog at the first usage, the sharethis.com server (from which the image is loaded) is able to associate your site with this unique identifier by the HTTP referer a browser sends. Therefore, using similar techniques as e.g. Google Analytics, sharethis.com is able to see how many visitors you have and which of your pages they viewed. In my opinion, this is quite insolent, as it massively invades your and your visitors’ privacy.
How can you protect yourself from this? You need to modify the file share-this.php from the plugin. The easiest way is to simply delete line 702 (in “Share this classic”, v1.5.1) where the image code is generated:
<div id="akst_credit"><a href="http://sharethis.com"><img src="http://r.sharethis.com/powered-by?publisher=<?php print(get_option('st_pubid')); ?>" alt="Powered by ShareThis" /></a></div>
Another option would to beat sharethis.com at their own game: Replace (also in line 702) get_option('st_pubid') with ak_uuid() (their internal function to generate the unique identifier), thus messing up their database. 
Just kidding — just remove the code as described.
Update: Looking a bit deeper into the plugin, I realized that it’s not only a webbug that the plugin loads, but also, each bookmarking is redirected to sharethis.com’s server! This means, whenever somebody clicks a bookmarking link, they are first sent to sharethis.com’s server and then redirected from there. You can overcome this, too, by a little modification: Change line 304 of share-this.php (in “Share this classic”, v1.5.1) to return base; — then you and your visitors are taken to the bookmarking service directly.
Update 2: More occurences of the offending technique are on the page which Share This displays when JavaScript is deactivated. Again, each bookmark link redirects to sharethis.com first, and the image in the footer is a webbug. To disable these items, change line 1132 in share-this.php to print('<li><a href="'.$link.'" id="akst_'.$key.'">'.$data['name'].'</a></li>'."\n"); and remove the footer (some lines deeper).
AfLinks-Plugin: Affiliate-Daten in WordPress-Beiträgen
Alex Günsche · January 16, 2008
Auf contutto.com gibt es jetzt das AfLinks-Plugin. Das AfLinks-Plugin versieht den Content von WordPress-Beiträgen mit Affiliate-Links, d.h. bestimmte Schlagworte im WP-Beitrag werden mit Werbung versehen. Fährt man mit der Maus über einen solchen Link, erscheint eine kleine Vorschau mit Bild und Beschreibung. Die Links werden von der Software entweder vollautomatisch erzeugt, oder man kann Produkte über eine zus. Suchmaske im WP-Editor auswählen und manuell verlinken.
Die Affiliate-Daten stammen aus dem Account des jeweiligen Webmasters bei Affili.net. Der Import erfolgt halbautomatisch über ein Script, er kann auch per Cronjob vollautomatisiert werden.
Vor allem interessant dürfte dieses Plugin für die Betreiber von Artikelkatalogen sein, die damit den betreuten Content besser kommerziell verwerten können. Aber auch für andere Webmaster, die etwa dezente Werbeformen suchen oder vielleicht nicht viel Platz für Banner haben, ist dieses Tool geeignet.
Das AfLinks-Plugin ist OpenSource (GNU GPL) und kann kostenlos von der Contutto-Website heruntergeladen werden. Demo und Doku sind ebenfalls vorhanden.
Codelog theme released
Alex Günsche · December 19, 2007
Usually, plugins are my business, but now I’ve also released a WordPress theme. Of course, it’s not the first WordPress theme I’ve developed, but it’s the first that I have revised to release it as generic theme. More information and download at codelog.net.