Unbelievable – it took more than one year from version 0.1 to the 1.0, which we released yesterday. But I have dedicated the last 24 hours to proceed coding on the Advanced Search, and so much has been changed that a jump to 2.0 seems justified – even if only a single day has passed since the last major release.

What exactly has been changed? Well, I was working on the upgrade of Advanced Search Lite which was actually a quick’n'dirty ripoff from Advanced Search. I started again to rip the code from the new AS to make the new AS Lite, when I realised I could as well merge them and have two plugins in one. For me this would mean less duplicate code to care after, for the user it means that they have more choice along with a slimer code base.

And so I merged Advanced Search and Advanced Search into one plugin download. They appear in the Plugin panel as two separate plugins. One can use either one or the other or even both at the same time. Also, there were even more features added: Blog visitors can now switch between searching strings or words(!), WP’s internal search can be transparently replaced with the FULLTEXT (i.e. word) search, and Advanced Search Lite can now also be used as a widget.

What do you think, is a 2.0 ok for this? I definitely think so, and I even dare to say that this is the bestest search plugin for WordPress evar, which everybody should have on their blogs. You heard me!

So, what are you waiting for? Visit the Advanced Search page, download it and enjoy searching 2.0 (no beta!).

Good news everybody! I’m happy to announce Advanced Search version 1.0! Not only is this version finally compatible with WordPress 2.3.x, but it also has been profoundly revised and cleaned up, a good number of bugs have been fixed, and it has a couple of shiny new features.

The most interesting feature is that you can now use the search form in a truly modular fashion without digging in the code: In the new config file settings.php, you can turn each section on or off. For example, if you have many categories and you don’t want people bothering with switching categories (not to talk of long loading times), you can simply turn this section off.

So, grab the new version and install it. And: don’t forget to spread the word! (Many people have requested a new version, not all are subscribed to this blog.)

Unfortunately, there are bad news, too: As a side effect of the cleanup, the plugin doesn’t work with the legacy series 2.0.x of WordPress anymore (on which this site runs, too). But version 0.6 should still do the job for us, and it will stay available for download.

By the way, the new version of Advanced Search Lite is in the making.

Update: Within a mere day, there was a version jump to 2.0!

Dear users of my plugins,

I know I haven’t updated my plugins for a while, even though some of them desperately need updates and although I have some very cool features on my TODO list. The reason is that I’m currently involved in a very big project, and this one really consumes pretty much all of my time and coding energy. That project will be finished by mid of November, and I promise that I will then start working on my plugins again and release a bunch of new versions. I hope you understand that, and I hope you’ll have some more patience. Thank you very much (in advance)!

By the way, my site seems to have a PR of 6 now, and I owe it all to the nice people who are writing nice comments about my plugins on their blogs. Thank you very much (again)!

Tonight, Oct. 18th at about 4:15 am, the Zirona I server will be shut down because of maintanance in the data center. The work is estimated to take about three hours. During this time, no services like e-mail and web will be available. After the maintenance works, the server is supposed to start up again automatically. It is however possible that there are complications, and it is also possible that they take the entire day or even more to be solved.

Even though downtime is always unpleasant, there’s no reason to be too sad: At least this server will have run more than 373 days untill this “forced” shutdown. This is an very impressive figure, and one shouldn’t take it for granted — it’s more that there are some important aspects that allowed the server to run such a long time.

• Although the webhost Hetzner did have two severe network problems this year, the servers kept running, which is an indication that Hetzner managed to solve the power issues in the data center (ironically, a power failure was the reason for the last showdown of this server), and the hardware seems — at least in the Zirona machine — not to be as bad as it’s sometimes said of Hetzner.
• Furthermore we can be happy, that the server was not compromised a single time during it’s now two years of usage — although there were a number of attacks, luckily every single of them could be averted. This is mostly due to the Linux system (to be precise: Hardened Gentoo in our case), but also due the other server applications like Apache, Postfix, Courier, MySQL, vsFTPd, and last but not least to often critisized web applications such as WordPress, Joomla, phpBB and osCommerce. You see, security has a lot to do with clean configuration and regular upgrading (though by far not only).

Therefore: Let’s hope for successful maintenance, a healthy re-awakening of the server tomorrow morning, and for the next uptime rekord!

P.S., 18.10., 11:04: We had a little hickup after the restart due to network rearrangements, but now everything runs fine again.

Due to massive spam attacks, I had to reconfigure our e-mail serive and integrate some additional restrictions. Also, we now use the blacklist of spamhaus.org; even though this organisation called attention through rowdily and arrogant behaviour, they do offer a very good antispam service.

In case you encounter sending (legitimate ) e-mail to Zirona or other domains on our server, please notify us through our contact form. If you do so, it is important that you provide as much information as possible. In case you got an error message, please attach that message to.

I’ve got a new private blog, Regular Impressions. It’s German, so it won’t be of Interest for non German readers, and I don’t need to translate the entire blog post.

ContactNG is a new generation of contact forms. You can display it in the sidebar or on a page. There are different skins which can be selected via the admin panel. Furthermore, the plugin features some intelligent antispam techniques. Tutorial, further information and downloads are available via the plugin’s homepage. Have fun! Feedback and improvement ideas are as always very welcome.

The contactNG plugin was pre-released today with an announcement in the Plugin Competition Blog.

I will work on the plugin a bit more in the next days and enhance the features based on the feedback.

Please download the plugin, install it, and let me know what you think.

The InstantUpgrade plugin has gained very much attention and positive feedback during the last weeks. Now it’s time for a new era: I’ve created a version of the plugin that will make the installation and usage significantly easier. While with 0.x versions it was neccessary to change tons of permissions on most hosts, the new version offers file transfer via FTP with the users credentials, so no permissions must be changed at all!

However, the new features, especially the FTP transfer, need very much testing before we can release it to the general public. Therefore I’d ask everybody to install the new version in their test environments and review the plugin extensively. Note: Please don’t use this version in productive environments yet.

Usage is as follows:

• Download it (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2 .zip, .7z)
• Upload instantupgrade to your plugin directory
• Activate it
• Go to InstantUpgrade » InstantUpgrade Configuration
• Select FTP as method (HTTP can also be used, installation/usage same as earlier versions)
• Enter FTP credentials
• Go to InstantUpgrade
• Select version (latest or arbitrary)
• Start upgrade

If you encounter errors during the installation which you think are errors of the plugin, please report them. After installation, please check your WordPress installation, and if you notice errors, please report them, too.

You can report bugs as comments below this post (please not at the plugin’s home page), or you can use our bugtracker. Any notice of what could be improved is welcome, same goes for questions, feature requests, etc. Please do also provide information about your testing environment.

Everybody who provides substantial feedback will be named (w/ link) in the final release announcement, so I hope you all get a piece of the fame.

Update (31.05, 14:28): The author of the FTP library, Alexey Dotsenko, has said he will put his work under the GNU LGPL.

WordPress 2.2 is soon to be released, and WordPress 2.3 also approaches. As functionality keeps on changing, I decided to test the InstantUpgrade-Plugin with the new versions. Result: works fine — with WP 2.2-RC1 as well as with WP 2.3-alpha (SVN Rev. 5451).

By the way, I finished moving, and I’m back at work with full power.