I was hoping to have a new version of FLIR out by today but life does that strange thing, you know where it interrupts with programming.

Anyway the new version is just a minor update that fixes a few bugs and adds a few small features and makes it a little more WordPress 2.7 friendly.

I need to finish up a few things then do some browser testing.

The changes should be as follows:

• Set the tags used by the Automatic method to follow the element types as defined in the configuration
• Add checkbox to allow the use of external JavaScript libraries – jQuery, Scriptaculous and Prototype support only
• Hide Elements to Replace section when using Automatic method as it is not used in that case.
• Add checkbox to disable FLIR for IE6 users to to various problems, may expand to disable for older browsers in general.
• Fix the global Use FancyFonts not showing it’s activated.
• Other minor interface fixes.

There may be some lingering issues with FLIR and Safari.  This post is by way of confirmation.

Flir & Safari

I am in the process of testing version 0.8 of FLIR for WP.  Assuming all goes well it should be released tomorrow sometime.  Here are some of the key changes:

• Updated Facelift to 1.2 release
• Rewrote code for better readability and adherence to code conventions (hopefully)
• Redesigned admin interface to be more logically organized (again, hopefully)
  • Added more helpful information to the configuration text.
• Added ability to specify all elements to replace rather than just the few I had.
  • For example you can specify something like h1,h2,div#sidebar a to have your h1, h2 headers and all of the sidebar links replaced.
• Fixed config-flir.php from being replaced or not present.

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.