WPBook 2.0.2: Tabs, Stream Publishing, Comment Imports

Lots of changes in WPBook 2.0.2, which I’ve just finished tagging for release, but the most important are:

  • Import of comments posted on Facebook Wall. (If you’re following non-stable, beta releases, you’ve had this since 2.0.0 – but it is improved and stable enough now for all to use)
  • Ability to suppress posting excerpts to Facebook on a post-by-post basis
  • Fix for bug with posting excerpts to Facebook Wall (of individual profile or fan page)
  • Revised instructions to match current Facebook and WPBook settings pages, in four steps
  • Reordered and simplified settings page, putting most used settings nearer the top (and matching new instructions step by step)
  • Tabs: for individual profiles and application profiles, you can now add a view of your blog as a tab – and much html is supported. (Sorry, no objects or iframes, thus no embedded videos).
  • Debug setting which writes a file with attempts to import comments
  • Ability to edit the attribution WPBook uses when posting to Facebook Walls
  • PHP 5 calls moved to conditional imports – should improve error reporting for folks trying to use WPBook on PHP4 hosts, when it requires PHP5

As always you can get the latest WPBook from the WordPress.org repository and let me know in the support forums how it’s working for you.

Here’s a quick screenshot of what this blog looks like in a tab (without this post, obviously):

Open Parenthesis blog as a Tab (Click for full size)

17 Comments

  1. I’m getting a lot of errors in the admin pages since updating the plugin:

    “Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /homepages/16/d92277137/htdocs/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wpbook/wpbook.php:1231) in /homepages/16/d92277137/htdocs/wordpress/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 890”

    The blog displays OK, but I can’t take admin actions such as saving posts.

  2. Looking at wp-includes/pluggable.php line 890, pointed to by the error message, it looks like you’re running IIS.

    I don’t have any blogs running on IIS (or any windows server) to test on, which makes this a bit hard to debug.

    It seems to be failing in the middle of a wp_redirect call but I’m not issuing any.

    Googling a bit, it seems related to unexpected whitespace before an opening

  3. A possibly hilarious follow-up – Your mentioning of the whitespace got me thinking. Since the error referenced wpbook.php:1231 I checked the file only to find that line 1231 was the last line of the code “?>” but that it had 2 blank lines after it.

    I deleted those blank lines and re-saved wpbook.php and the error seems to have gone away.

  4. Yep – extra whitespace throws this error.

    I just cleaned up the whitespace (and straightened out how some of the includes work) and released a 2.0.3 version.

    Thanks for your troubleshooting help – not sure why my server never complained . . .

  5. John,
    Let me first say great work on keeping the project going and in a direction (that i think) the community wants. I also would like to apologize for not being more active in recent developement of WPBook.

    2.x is looking good as far as features. I think at some point I’ll have to step in there and clean up the Admin interface a bit (if you don’t mind) we are getting so many options it’s crazy. I don’t know if you’ve seen the admin interface of YOURLS WordPress plugin but it may be what we need for the next Admin interface overhaul.

    Anyway, mostly just wanted to say good work.

  6. Thanks Brooke – I definitely would like to clean up settings at some point, and also move to the Settings API.

    Does YOURLS create it’s own admin pane, so you have submenus inside the settings page?

    I had thought about doing that with this release, but had enough on my plate already . . .

  7. Yes – I like that better (the expanding/collapsing sections).

    I would like to avoid submenus – if every plugin did that the admin will get unusable – but have a cleaner way to hide the settings not yet needed.

    Does the YOURLS plugin use the WordPress Settings API? (This would mean upping our base requirement to WP 2.7, but I was thinking of doing that anyway).

    http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_API

  8. I just looked and YOURLS does use the Settings API and I would hope so it’s written by Ozh. I wasn’t saying we had to copy them I just liked the way they set up the admin. I have no problem with bumping up the version to 2.7.

    Some other things I think we need to conceder with the admin interface include, are tooltips helpful? I created a survey on poll daddy but didn’t get any responses: http://poll.fm/1ij81 I’m starting to think they are more of a pain then they are worth. Another idea I had was to move the install instructions away from the plugin folder and host them elsewhere. This would clean up about 1mb of the total plugin size.

    Just throwing these ideas out there. I don’t know the best place to share ideas. We seem to jump from Google Groups to WordPress forums, to e-mail to this blog. I try to keep the discussion open to the community but I’m not sure other people really want to get involved.

  9. Yeah, I feel your pain on different forums. I like the WordPress.org support forum for support issues, but it isn’t really good for “how to develop the plugin” discussions.

    Problem is I don’t really want to create yet another place to discuss it – perhaps we should use the Support forum but set the topic to “not a support request” for things where we’re discussing potential ideas?

  10. I know you said you’re not ready for another site yet. However, I just bought wpbook.net which I plan to use to host the install instructions as well as a link to the support fourm. You don’t have to change the plugin site url if you don’t want to but it will give us a place to expand in the future if need be. I dunno when I’ll have the site up and running but I’ll let you know.

  11. Can we install some kind of ticketing system there, like trac?

    I’d like to keep using wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpbook/ and the SVN that they provide, but it would be nice to have a ticketing system somewhere.

  12. I don’t know how to install trac but I do know how to and have experience with OSticket. I could always try to get trac working. I guess it depends on if you’re looking for a project manager or just a simple place for support request. As a side note, are you ever available to chat (like on aim google whatever) about WPBook

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