WordPress 4.0 just got released and it had some great stuff added. One of the things you do is maintaining and checking if your plugins are still compatible. For some plugins like YouTube DJ it wasn’t needed and it was as simple as increasing the “tested up to” version but for others I had to do some coding because it’s heavy connected to WordPress like gmagick and WP DB Driver. From all the plugins I maintain on WordPress.org nothing got a major improvement but just some nice minor enhancements.
New plugins on .org
An hour ago I did release two new plugins. One is a little project I builded for a good friend of mine which has it’s own photo gallery site on fesere.de and he needed a fullscreen view for the galleries on the site. The plugin is called Fullscreen Gallery and is still pretty simple but that will change in the upcoming weeks. We will be working on several other themes and finding ways to integrate better in an existing theme.
The second plugin will be a great addition to someone wanting to do a little bit more with images. It’s called Improved Image Editor and currently let”s you set the zoom, quality and filters to an image size. You can easily do that by calling:
Improved_Image_Editor::register_image_size_info()
It will integrate a few plugins I build and will focus on the future of image editing. It’s there to push WordPress forward and to test out new possibilities. Also here there are still a lot of things to do but already the current implementation gives developers some great power.
Other cool stuff on GitHub
Two weeks ago I started with a new pet project called Improved-Heartbeat. The idea was to build an API around the Heartbeat API that allows you to trigger events. Currently everything is based on filters and tho it works good, it doesn’t have to work for your scenario. In case you missed the talk of Mike Schroder about the Heartbeat API in New York then I would recommend to check out his blog post about it. He builded an awesome honk example but the way it worked was not really robust. I now implemented the same but then based on the API I builded. It’s still not perfect but I’m getting close to it. It does work perfect when sending it to a specific user like the Yo example.
The second project I want to highlight is Node WordPress Utils. It’s code I wrote for a Node.js server that implements socket connections. When a user connects, I do want to know if he is logged in. Current implementation does require you to have installed the JSON REST API. I’m still looking at WP CLI support and even native support. But the last option isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. For authentication it already does it work but there is always room for improvements.
WPCentral
The site hasn’t changed a lot lately but it’s nice to follow the updates at http://wpcentral.io/internationalization/. It already indicated that 27 locales have been updated to 4.0. Also you can easily see if your locale has a language pack. You should keep an eye on it while I’m building some new features for it that will get released in the next couple of weeks.
Upcoming stuff
As people have seen a lot is going on with GlotPress and I can’t wait to show all the new features to the validators and translators who are going to WordCamp Europe. WordPress 4.0 changed a lot for them and now it’s up to GlotPress to keep improving the tools they are using.
Also I’m already thinking about stuff I want to work on during 4.1. In the upcoming weeks I will start writing patches to work on ideas I have for media and taxonomies. Like I would love to add filters to change the taxonomy name but that one will take a lot of work to be sure everything is still working.
I’m also curious what the current status is for custom statuses which is an old ticket with quite a few patches. Also I will just browsing around the source code and patch the little things that I say could be done different.