Smashing Magazine has a very lengthy article they published recently called WordPress Developer’s Toolbox and it’s pretty impressive as well as exhaustive. I’m probably going to pull all the resources apart and sling them into a set of toolbox pages with additional information as I can provide here. I’d really like to see the thing pulled apart and repurposed as a PDF but it’s a lot of resources.
Lightbox Plus and FLIR, Projects and Frameworks
I’ve got a whole lot on my plate and development efforts for Lightbox Plus, FLIR for WordPress and Actionable are going to have to go on hold for a bit. I’m going to try to push out another release of Lightbox Plus either tonight or tomorrow then after that I probably won’t even be able to provide much in the way of support for about a week and a half. I’ve got to literally cram a 3-4 week project into 3-4 days. I’m not looking forward to it. Then I’m going out of town for about five days for a much needed escape.
To get the project I need to finish out done by Thursday of next week I’m looking at some frameworks for PHP though I’m not sure they wouldn’t just slow me down. Ideally they shouldn’t and right now I’m trying to decide between CakePHP and Symfony. Both are good but it’s pretty much going to be whichever I can pick up on quickest tomorrow or Sunday night.
After I get back from being away I will still have more to do on the project but I should hopefully be able to put some time into the plugins – at the very least I should be able to do some support. I hope everything doesn’t go to hell in a handbasket while I’m gone.
FLIR for WordPress
Not long ago I ran across some a set of scripts (JavaScript/PHP) called Facelift which is an alternative to sIFR and I thought this needs WordPress plugin to make it easy for people to use with WordPress.
So I downloaded it and created a plugin from it. Since then – Sunday – it’s proven extremely popular.
A lot of people seem to be having some issues with it and I think the bulk of them come down to two things:
First you need to have the GD Graphics Library built into your PHP installation. This is probably the main contributor to the problem. The second issue is probably not having your cache folder for the plugin be writable. I’ll be glad to help anyone – within reason – get these issues resolved.
I am pretty much constantly trying to work on this plugin to get it up to version 1.0.0 – it currently sits at 0.5.5 and as such is functional but incomplete.
You can get it from Facelift Image Replacement and you can get support at Mawhorter.net Forums or via commenting on the plugin page.
Lightbox Plus
I just finished version 1.0 of Lightbox Plus. Lightbox Plus is a WordPress plugin that implements Lightbox JS by Lokesh Dhakar. Lightbox Plus is used to create overlay display images on the webpage and to automatically add the correct overlay links to images. Lightbox Plus captures the image title for display.
You can download it and get support on the Lightbox Plus page.