Hack Blog

Hic Sunt Dracones

Lee Turner — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:29:37 +0000

Here Be Dragons

This post is dedicated to one of the founding Quam Plures dragons - Yabba who passed away suddenly yesterday.

You will be greatly missed in many, many ways.

R.I.P my friend

Hic Sunt Dracones

Including RSS Feeds In Your Posts

Lee Turner — Fri, 27 May 2011 20:55:50 +0000

As I have just released the zRSSFeed Plugin I thought I would do a quick post to show you what it looks like with a couple of RSS feeds included in a post. I have taken a couple of feeds from the main Quam Plures website, namely the latest news blog and the codex blog. See what you think:

All in all not too bad

Including RSS Feeds In Your Posts

Up and Coming Plugins

Lee Turner — Tue, 24 May 2011 18:25:08 +0000

Things have been a little hectic in my work life over the past few months so, much to my disappointment, work on QP has been a little non existent. However, on the up side, pretty much all the new sites I put together are now built with QP so I am getting chance to give it a really good road test and figure out what plugins I need. I try where ever possible to use formal releases of QP (other than this blog which normally has the most recent dev version) so they are all running version 0.0.0. It is proving to be a really stable build with a few bugs being found and pretty much already fixed on Launchpad.

So, in this post I thought I would give you a quick update as to the Quam Plures plugins that I am going to be releasing over the next week or two.

Markdown Plugin

If you are not familiar with Markdown by John Gruber then I recommend you stop reading this now and head on over to his site and get reading. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for writers and it allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format then convert it to, amongst other things, structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Pretty much all of the writing I do now is in the Markdown format (including this blog post) so as you can imagine, the Markdown plugin allows you to write your blog posts in the Markdown format and have them rendered in HTML at display time.

Hello Bar Plugin

The Hello Bar is a simple web toolbar that engages users and communicates a call to action. You can find out more at the Hello Bar website. This plugin allows you to add the hello bar to your QP website and enable or disable on a per blog basis and even display different hello bars on different blogs.

zRSS Feed Plugin

One of my little side projects has been to set up my own URL bookmarking site (more on that in a separate post) and as part of that project I wanted to display feeds from other popular social bookmarking sites. I wanted something nice and simple and found a little JQuery project that did just what I wanted. This plugin will allow you to add rss feeds to your blog posts in a nice, easy, convenient way.

Base URL Plugin

This is a really simple plugin that just replaces a placeholder with the base url of your website. This plugin came about because I wanted a way to use the same content (like privacy policy and terms and conditions) across multiple sites and I didn't want to have to worry about changing the URLs every time.

Well, that's about it for now. Keep an eye on the blog for when these plugins are released.

Photo credit: Samuel M. Livingston

Up and Coming Plugins

Version 0.2 of the Webmaster Plugin

Lee Turner — Mon, 16 May 2011 13:24:12 +0000

Version 0.2 of the Webmaster Plugin has just been released. This version brings two simple changes to the Google Analytics settings of the plugin, which basically allow you to better position the analytics code and allow you to integrate the new site speed report. The new features are:

You now have the option to include the analytics code in the <head> section of your site.
Google have recently released the option for Google Analytics to track the page load speeds of your site. Extra code is needed in your sites pages to do this and this release of the plugin allows you to add that code.

To read more about the new site speed report in Google Analytics, see the post on the analytics blog: Measure Page Load Time with Site Speed Analytics Report

You can download this plugin from the Hacking Quam Plures plugin repository

Enjoy

Version 0.2 of the Webmaster Plugin

Hacking the Admin Look and Feel

Lee Turner — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 20:36:31 +0000

Just like many other aspects of Quam Plures, the admin console has changed significantly since we departed from b2evolution 3.3.3. We have moved settings around to allow them to be grouped more logically together and totally removed all the blue from the old admin look and feel. This left us with something that looked like this:

OK, it works, it is functional but after I had been using the admin console for a number of weeks I noticed that my eyes were always drawn immediately to the dark headers and not to the parts of the screen that I actually wanted to work with (writing content or changing settings for example). I therefore set off to tone it down a little bit and make it a little more pleasing to the eye - well, to my eyes anyway

My main goal was for my eyes to be immediately drawn to the parts of the screen I wanted to work with and for the rest of the screen to just blend away into the background and not be distracting. I decided to keep the grey look and feel as it wasn't offensive in any way (admittedly it made the whole admin console look a little, well, grey really but hey, it worked for me) and started to make the colour shifts in a lot more subtle. Anyway, a long story short here is what I ended up with:

Now, the main down side to this new look and feel is that the contrast is a lot less between all the different screen elements and for some people this may be a little hard to work with. However, on the up side, this new look and feel provides a great basis to work from for creating new colour schemes like this one:

Again, it might not be to everyone's taste but it certainly has contrast The problem when we are making look and feel changes instead of functionality changes is that we are never going to meet everyone's tastes but hitting a middle ground would be good. An interesting project would be a total redesign of the admin console...... but that is for a different day.

Photo credit: murtazabravo

Hacking the Admin Look and Feel

Cleaning up the installer

Lee Turner — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 13:20:34 +0000

There are still a few things left over from b2evo in the QP code base and one of those things is the installer. It is still very orange and has the grey gradient images for the background. It also uses images to make up the bulk of the rounded corners on the page. Over the past few days I have been working on simplifying the installer and giving it a cleaner look and feel and a cleaning up the code a little. I think the installer now looks a lot better and definitely easier on the eye. Maybe more work to do but certainly a good starting point.

This is how the installer now looks:

Just small improvements really but I think it looks a lot better than it did.

Photo credit: Malkav

Cleaning up the installer

Easier Upgrade Process

Lee Turner — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 20:03:51 +0000

Upgrading your blog software is never an easy job. There are a number of things that can go wrong and a number of things you need to be aware of before starting your upgrade. Obviously the most important one is to back up your database and backup your files before doing anything. Now Quam Plures doesn't have an automated update solution where you click a button and your blog software is updated (not that I think I would use one) so the way we update to a newer version is by overwriting the software on our servers with the newest release. This, of course, leads to the question of which files you should overwrite.

Back in the days of b2evolution this was quite difficult as all the 'system' files and directories were mixed up with all the user directories (media folder and the like) so there was always questions flying around as to what needs to be overwritten and what should stay. QP has tried to make this whole process a little easier by making all of the 'system' folders easily identifiable by prefixing them with 'qp_'. Take a look at the following screen shot to see what I mean (click to get a bigger image):

As you can see from the picture, it is very easy to see which are QP folders and which are your folders. Hopefully this will make the upgrade process a little easier in the future.

Photo credit: quenerapu

Easier Upgrade Process

What are those .pot files anyway?

Lee Turner — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 12:50:53 +0000

I have been developing plugins for b2evolution for a little while now and am in the process of converting those over to QP. Throughout that whole time I have always made sure that my plugins used the right code to make them translatable into other languages. However, I never went as far as to extract out the text strings to make my plugins easy to translate. As it turns out there is a specific format for doing this.

With all the plugins shipped with QP there is a folder called 'po' that contains a file called messages.pot. This file contains all the strings contained in the plugin code that you might want to translate. Here is a good definition from http://www.icanlocalize.com

POT – Portable Object Template. This is the file that you get when you extract texts from the application. Normally, you send this file to your translators.
PO – Portable Object. This is the file that you receive back from the translators. It’s a text file that includes the original texts and the translations.

So, while I have been playing around with the quicktags plugin I thought it was about time I learned how to create these files (mainly because my changes wouldn't have been accepted otherwise ).

EdB pointed me in the direction of a piece of software called Poedit which totally simplifies the creation of these files. So here is a brief update on how I went about doing it:

1) Download and install Poedit for your chosen platform (I am on a Mac)

2) Go to File -> New Catalog. The following screen should appear:

3) Enter the project name and version and then click on the Paths tab:

The messages.pot file is located in a sub folder of the main plugin folder so we need to tell Poedit to look in the parent folder for our source files. We therefore need to add a new path to this screen which is the '..' path that denotes the parent directory.

4) Next, click on the Keyword tab:

This screen is asking what functions you are using in your code to perform the translations. In Quam Plures this is the code T_('Text Goes Here') so in this screen we need to add a new keyword 'T_'. Once you have done this click on the OK button and you will be prompted for a location to save the .po file. You should select the plugin's 'po' folder. This will be the same folder as where the file 'messages.pot. is located. At this stage I don't recommend overwriting the messages.pot file as it contain header comments that we need to keep.

Update: One of the things I found out while playing with the QuickTags plugin is that QP has a function that you need to use when when echoing strings for use in JavaScript. This is the TS_('Text Goes Here') function and there is also one called 'NT_'. This means that in this stage you need to add the 'T_', 'TS_' and the 'NT_' keywords.

After clicking OK, Poedit will scan the parent directories for your code and extract out all the translatable strings based on the keywords we provided. Once it has done that, the following screen should appear:

Click on the OK buton and then save. You should now have a .po file in the same directory as the file 'messages.pot'. Once I was at this stage I opened both files and copied the contents of my new .po file over the contents of messages.pot while leaving the header comments and text alone. I then deleted the new .po file. This last part is not optimal so I will have to dig into the Poedit settings to see if I can get it to enter all the header info for me to enable me to just overwrite the messages.pot file.

Photo credit: dibytes

What are those .pot files anyway?

Playing with the Quick Tags plugin

Lee Turner — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 11:46:11 +0000

There have been quite a few changes to QP since it was originally forked. The admin console has bee streamlined, made more flexible and had a colour change (although more work is needed there ). Skins are now Templates, the install process is now improved as it asks you for an admin username and password and the upgrade process should now be a lot smoother due to a new directory naming convention. However, a lot of the changes aren't visible from the outside as a lot of code has been refactored and removed (I am thinking spam and calling home code here). Anyway, the thing I am playing with today is the Quick Tags plugin.

This is a plugin that is distributed with the core and adds a number of toolbars to the write/edit post screen to allow you to quickly insert html tags. This plugin is a god send if (like me) you don't like the WYSIWYG editors. Today's job is to add more features to the Link button. At the moment it prompts you for a URL to link to and that is it. I want it to also prompt you for a title attribute and possibly a class and a target attribute also. The title attribute should always be there so the plugin will always prompt for that but the class and the target will be configurable items (ie you can turn them on or off and if they are on you can set a default.) The default for these configurable items will be off. Something like this:

Photo credit: ianlloyd

Playing with the Quick Tags plugin