I am using using Windows Live Writer as my alternative blogging tool for my personal site. I am still using standard WordPress interface for most of my work, but sometimes I use this desktop tool. I was very excited to see what it is possible to do with its SDK. So I started to look around and play…

This is one of my first and of course simplest plugin – Live Writer Signature. It is for inserting random text(there are five total) informing users that this post was created using Windows Live Writer. Use is very simple, just place your cursor wherever you want and press plugin shortcut from "Insert" panel.

Download assembly or source code.

This post was created using Windows Live Writer.

WP-Outage 1.0 is my new WordPress plugin. It is always need to do some site tuning. But it is sad let visitors look at possible error(I know that you do not any ) so that was basic idea for this plugin. It simply redirect visitors from your homepage to location with some outage/temporary page.

Options

General options

• Set URL or relative path to custom outage/temporary page
• IP addresses that are allowed to view standard pages(separated by ‘,’)

Direct outage options

• Activate/deactivate display of outage/temporary page

Scheduled outage options

• Activate/deactivate scheduled display of outage/temporary page
• Outage interval starts from date (time is optional)
• Outage interval ends at date (time is optional)

Installation and usage

• Unzip plugin and upload it to your WordPress plugin directory
• Activate plugin using WordPress administration interface
• Prepare your temporary page and upload it to your server (be careful in case of rewriting URLs)
• Configure plugin options using WordPress administration interface(Options->Outage)

You can choose between  zip file or tar.gz file for download. Feel free to contact me if you have any comments.

Well, it was a day before yesterday I released my first WP plugin named WP-Plugin List 1.0 and today I would like to present you my another new plugin. More simple that one before .

Using WP-Custom Logo 1.0 you can replace WP default login/register page logo by placing URL to custom logo you have (in proper size of course ). It is done using JavaScript onload event. It is not ideal, because there is small delay. I will try to improve it as soon as possible(I created it because of need for one small project…). Reason for using approach is seamless WP upgrades without any need for backup wp-admin.css or changed wordpress-logo.png.

Configuration is simple as you can see:

Options

General options

• Path to your custom logo image (empty for original logo)

Installation

• Unzip plugin and upload it to your WordPress plugin directory
• Activate plugin using WordPress administration interface
• Configure plugin options using WordPress administration interface(Options->Custom Logo)

Usage

Just use . It is done.

Update

Yes, it took some time, but I just finished new version and it is WordPress 2.7.1 ready .

Update to 2.1

New rewriten version of this plugin is ready for download. It should support also version prior to 2.5, but it is optimized for 2.6 version. NOTE: this plugin does not work with Turbo(Gears) enabled!

Update to 2.2

Completely rewritten version using my new help WPOL library (acronym stays for WordPress OpenLab which is a company I co-own) with some fixes and improvements e.g. working now on register page.

You can download plugin from an official WordPress repository.

Happy using

So I finally wrote my first plugin for WordPress . It is inspired by WP-Contact Form plugin by Ryan Duff. Its purpose is simple(see example). By placing (just like (X)HTML comment with two dashes) in your page or post by sources code or using toolbar icon ‘Plugin List’ in your Rich text editor(only if enabled) plugin replaces it with list of currently installed WordPress plugins. WP-Plugin List has some options. You can access them ad admin interface – Options->Plugin List.

Options

General options

• Enable/disable display of ‘Plugin List’ Quicktag in Rich text editor

Display options

• Enable/disable display of non active plugins
• Enable/disable display of plugin version
• Enable/disable display of headline with custom text
• Custom headline text (use %TOTAL% for total number of plugins)

Installation

• Unzip plugin and upload it to your WordPress plugin directory
• Activate plugin using WordPress administration interface
• Configure plugin options using WordPress administration interface(Options->Plugin List)

Usage

Use is very simple. Just place <!–plugin list–> in your page or post by sources code or using toolbar icon ‘Plugin List’ in your Rich text editor(only if enabled).

You can download plugin from an official WordPress repository.

Feel free to contact me if you have any comments.

Fixes

• Improved pattern replacement for plugin tag
• Plugin list caching

Update to 1.10

There is not much new just one new feature. Enzo asked me about some changes and I decided to make it public. He wanted an option to disable displaying plugin description in the list. I also added another simple feature – disable display of  WP-Plugin List among other plugins . So it is simple as you can see.

Update for 2.1

Completely rewriten interface and code to fit 2.5 and newer version of WordPress.

Update to 2.2

Completely rewritten version using my new help WPOL library (acronym stays for WordPress OpenLab which is a company I co-own) with some fixes too.

Well I am back from a wonderful vacation at Rhodes island. It was really great time to relax and study. I did not see computer (my of course) for a quite long time . I am back with a lot of ideas in my mind and full of energy. I will post more information about this wonderful island including some of my photos (after small post production).

If you do not already know that, I am a proud user of WordPress 2.0 for my websites including this one. Decision about my new blogging system was based on the fact, that I could migrate old content to this system without much effort including content and also structure and layout. Another important thing is that WP is quite popular and has a lot of plugins and general community. After an experimenting phase I tried many plugins and this post will be mainly targeted to give you some tips for building your own website/blog using WordPress Blogging system.

Plugins I am using (26 total)

• Search Query Monitor Dashboard Widget v0.1
• Acronym Replacer v2.8
• Lightbox 2.02 Plugin v0.6.3
• Hello Dolly v1.6
• All in One SEO Pack v1.6.13.8
• Akismet v2.5.3
• Acronym Replacer v2.8
• Breadcrumb Navigation XT v1.7
• Custom Logo v2.2
• Hello Dolly v1.6
• Lightbox 2.02 Plugin v0.6.3
• Maintenance Mode v5.4
• Plugin List v2.3
• reCAPTCHA v2.6
• Sitemap Index v1.2.2
• Simple Tags v2.2
• Twitter for WordPress v1.9.7
• WP-Print v2.50
• WP-PostRatings v1.62
• Search Query Monitor Dashboard Widget v0.1
• WP-Syntax v0.9.12
• WP-Enhanced Plugin Management v1.1
• WP-ContactForm v1.5.1
• WP-Enhanced Management v2.0
• WP-Optimize v0.9.4
• WP-Polls v2.62

I will post here only one screenshot of administration interface, because I think there is a lot of resources around the Net. So here you can see my modiefied admin with SpotMilk 1.5.3 theme and modified WYSI-Wordpress 4.1 TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor with additional plugins. I am testing some other plugins so I will update this post later. I hope this post will help with building your own website powered by this great WordPress.

Today I am going to my summer vacation to Rhodes(Kremasti) for a two weeks. I am really looking forward to some relax and free time without computers… But I have some technical books to read and ideas(yes of course for our www.wmsuite.com framework) to think about .

Maybe you were surprised when you saw this new blogging category on this page, because it should be about programming stuff, but there is a good reason for it. I really love good food and friends of mine know it well . I visited quite a lot of restaurants round the Prague city. There are many places to go for a lunch or dinner. A lot of them are just great but there are also (as in almost all cities all round the world ) restaurants you do not want to visit anymore. So I want to share my opinions and experiences to save your stomach, money and nerves .

I am not a gastronomical expert and I know it. I won’t go to any extra expensive restaurants for immortals or celebrities, I just want a good food, from good sources with amazing taste and not to become totally poor .

I got a lot of in my mind so please stay tuned and come back later for my first reviews….

Bon Appetite!

Well according to IEBlog there are a lot of new (and surely welcomed from web developers) bug fixes to comply with W3C standards. I am really looking forward, because currently feeling about IE7 Beta 2 a bit disappointed. But I know it is still beta .

Fixed bugs first:

• All bugs on positioniseverything.net except the “escaping floats” bug (which is planned for the future)
  • Peekaboo Bug
  • Internet Explorer and Expanding Box Problem
  • Quirky Percentages
  • Line-height bug
  • Border Chaos
  • Disappearing List-Background bug
  • Guillotine Bug
  • Unscrollable Content bug
  • Duplicate Characters Bug
  • IE and Italics
  • Doubled Float-Margin bug
  • Duplicate Indent bug
  • Three pixel text jog
  • Creeping Text bug
  • Missing First letter bug
  • Phantom box bug

Details on some of the other bugs (from sources other than the positioniseverything.net list) that were fixed:

• Overflow now works correctly! (That means boxes do not automatically grow any more.)
• Parser bugs: * HTML, _property and /**/ comment bug 
• Select control: CSS style-able and not always on top
• Auto-sizing of absolute positioned element with width:auto and right & left (great for 3 column layouts)
• Addressed many relative positioning issues
• Addressed many absolute positioned issues
• % calculations for height/width for abs positioned elements http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=191182
• <?xml> prolog no longer causes quirks mode
• HTML element truly independent of the Body (now gets its own width, height etc.)
• 1 px dotted borders no longer render as dashed
• Bottom margin bug on hover does not collapse margins
• Several negative margin issues fixed
• Recalc issues including relative positioning and/or negative margins are fixed now
• CLSID attribute of <object> tag no longer limited to 128 characters
• :first-letter whitespace bug described in http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/02/460115.aspx fixed
• Descendant selector now works properly for grand children when combined with other selectors
• First-line and first-letter now applies when there is no space between word :first-line and opening brace {
• Pseudo-classes now are working as expected if selector is excluded
• The :link selector works now for anchor tag with href set to bookmark
• Addressed !important issues
• PositionIsEverything piefecta-rigid.htm now works
• List-item whitespace bug fixed
• Fixed Absolutely Buggy II
• Absolute positioned elements now use always correct containing block for positioning and size information
• Nested block elements now respect all overflow declarations (hidden, scroll, etc)
• Fixed the opposing offset problem (absolute positioned element whit all four top, bottom left and right are present)
• <a> tags nested within LI elements will no longer add extra bottom margin when hover occurs
• We no longer lose the image aspect ratio on refresh
• Cleaned up our ident parsing according to CSS2.1 rules
• Fixed parsing bugs for multi- class selectors and class selectors that are combined with id selectors
• Enable :hover on all elements not just on <a>
• Background-attachment: fixed works on all elements – so Eric Meyer’s complexspiral demo works
• Improved <object> fallback

New features from CSS2.1:

• Min/max width/height support (also for images, which did not work in IE7b2)
• Transparent borders
• Fixed positioning support
• Selectors: first-child, adjacent, attribute, child
  • A couple of CSS 3 attribute selectors: prefix, suffix and substring since we were working already in the code base (also the general sibling selector)
• Alpha channel PNG support (Not a CSS feature but too important for designers to not call it out J)

Improvements in Standars support

• The IE 7 Readiness Toolkit pulls together documentation, tools, and guidance for developers, testers, and ITPros to prepare sites, extensions and applications for IE 7.
• The Cascading Style Sheet Compatibility in Internet Explorer 7 – documentation on common breaking patterns and techniques you can do to avoid them.
• Developer and ITPro Checklists
• The IE Developer Center is the clearinghouse for all (past and present) IE developer information.
• We have an Application Compatibility Toolkit that logs and identifies changes in behavior due to changes in IE 7 and Vista.
• All of this is wrapped up for you in the Information Index for IE 7.

I know that you already heard about Windows Live Writer. But if did not, I will take show you some basic features of this product. First of all I have to say that this post is written using this blogging tool .

So lets start with basic features:

• WYSIWYG Authoring
• Photo Publishing
• Map Publishing
• Writer SDK
• Compatibility

This is a small list of main features and I want to pickup some of them and give you more info about it. So lets start with WYSIWYG authoring, because it is first thing that impress you. After first launch of writer I was asked for my blog/web location and account. In next step Writer detected my blog and download all content and skin. It was really impressing to write you post from Windows application with look of your blog  blog skin.

There are many features that I did not tested yet, but thing I am really excited is Writer SDK. I am going to learn this API to enhance writers functions. I will write more on Live Writer later, when I have more experiences from real work. At this point I have to say that it really surprised me and I am quite sure that I will definitely use it – not for all postings, but definitely for that posted from my home workstation .