For those who frequent RouterTech it can’t have escaped your attention that we have recently released our v2.5 firmware. This was an important release for many reasons and marks an impressive milestone as we approach our 2 year birthday.

We now have over 4,000 community members, have had nearly 10,000 downloads of our firmware and have recently welcomed a new member to the RouterTech team. My impending graduation will give me a lot more time to work on the website and other aspects of the group so I hope things will get that little bit better in a few months time, if that is possible!

I had a quick hack around today with Calendar for WordPress and I have fixed some of the long standing bugs that while weren’t serious, were causing some people issues. I’ve also tightened up some of areas I considered sightly weaker than they should be on the security front and also introduced a few new features.

One of the most notable changes is in the way the links work on the new version. Personally I much prefer the clean URL structure that currently ships with Calendar, however this requires a modification to the .htaccess file which many users were having issues with. This was due to the vastly differing ways in which people had chosen to setup their blogs and permalink structures already chosen.

The new version will provide standard arguments-in-a-url style operation and nothing else. It will install and work on any blog configuration out of the box (even MU as I’ve had requests for it to work on that too) and without edits to the .htaccess file. Clean URLs however will only be possible with a code edit to the plugin file and the addition of lines in the .htaccess file. Because of the support time that .htaccess issues have consumed in the past, users making such changes on their own will have to choose to do so unsupported.

Below I have listed all the modifications made so far, but this is not an exhaustive list of everything that will make it into the next release.

• Security audit resulting in increased code injection protection of argument strings
• Removed the need to edit the .htaccess file
• Removed clean URLs by default as these were causing issues for novices
• Placed the whole plugin into one file; install is now just a case of dropping this file into your plugins directory and activating it
• Enabled compatibility with WordPress MU
• Fixed the bug in the admin screen that would cause IE users to not see the dates, times etc. in add/edit event the form.
• Allowed the week to start on a Sunday. Users who have their WordPress options set to Sunday as the starting day of the week will see the calendar obeying the setting.

A release will be made in the next few days both here and on the WordPress plugins repository. If anyone has anything in particular they would like to see in the next version then shout in comments.

Recently an upgrade on my hosting server has been conducted, making a change from predominantly PHP4 (PHP5 available but not widely used) to predominantly PHP5 (PHP4 available but infrequently used). This has been prompted by the announcement by PHP developers that support for PHP4 will be discontinued at the end of the year.

I didn’t think there would be any issues with the migration as I have long been coding in a PHP5 compatible way, however after the move Halifax Online suffered a few issues. After much investigation I discovered that this was due to some deprecated code use within some functions in a party application which had been added to the site. This was easily fixed, but the issue its self is rather interesting.

It is common practice to store ephemeral data in loops and pass this data along to other loops or functions. While the actual variable name doesn’t matter so long as it is consistent, it makes sense to name it something which indicates that the data is for use only in situ and is ephemeral. The developer of the problematic application had used a variable named $this to perform this action.

Name wise this makes a lot of sense because it indicates quite clearly that the content of the variable is ephemeral and for use only in situ, especially with respect to functions. The problem is that $this is somewhat reserved under PHP5 and so while can be read from under ordinary circumstances, cannot be written to. This is because in an object orientated environment it is used to represent the current object in which a piece of code resides, and so changing it within this context has no meaning; changing attributes of it makes sense, but changing the whole thing (as the code was effectively doing by assigning it a value) is impossible. Can I demolish and rebuild my house while still inside it?

I just thought I’d share this little gem with folk who are trying to make their applications PHP5 compatible before the end of the year. It took me quite a while to find because I was looking primarily for deprecated function use, not variable use.

I’ve had many people contact me since I launched my Calendar plugin to wordpress.org asking if it is possible to change the day the week starts on from Monday to Sunday. Now obviously I’m aware that some people do start the week on Sunday, but I had never realised quite how many people this was until the use of my plugin became widespread and I must say I’m still really perplexed as to why.

The working week the whole world over is Monday through Friday, with Saturday and Sunday being affectionately known as the “week end”. This being the case, how can Sunday be the start of the week on a calendar when it is one of the days that constitutes the week end? Surely it is a contradiction in terms? Visibly this would make the week end split up at opposite sides of the calendar.

Due to demand I will be allowing users of the next version of my Calendar to change the day the week starts on but in the mean time I’d very much like comments on why some might start the week on a Sunday. Any financial, economic, religious etc. reasons with online references to further explanations would particularly helpful.

For those that use my Calendar for WordPress you may be interested to know about a modification by “Ben in Campus” that has been written for it that enables several calendars to be made visible and have events added to them but using only one install of my plugin on one install of WordPress. It’s an innovative idea and one that a couple of people who have e-mailed me in the past asking for such a feature will most certainly find useful.

The same database table is used as previously but a column has been added allowing the storage to denote which calendar a particular event has input. Ben has also fixed a couple of bugs which have been on my to-do list for a little while, so they will be incorporated along with a credit to Ben in the next release, which is actually coming really rather soon so keep an eye out here and on wordpress.org

Tonight I attended my first weekly meeting for the XLAB project, in fact it finished at a little after 10pm! The meetings are basically a round-up of work done to date, a place to show work completed so far and a forum to discuss future project direction. As it was the first meeting I had attended it was very interesting to see the bigger picture but also quite a sharp reality check as I realised how much work there is to do and in how small an amount of time. We need to have a working product prototype for basic testing all ready to deploy by the end of the month! I’ve certainly got my work cut out thats for sure. On the plus side these meetings are supplemented by witty comments and large take away pizza orders which is always a nice thing.

Yesterday I released my calendar plugin for WordPress to the WordPress community at large on wordpress.org and it has got off to a flying start. I have close to 100 downloads already and it hasn’t even been online for 24 hours yet. I’m very pleased at the positive comments I have been getting through e-mail, please keep sending your reports (good or bad) to me.

I’m hoping to release a few more of my hand-rolled WordPress add-ons soon and obviously eventually these will make it into the WordPress plugin directory also. It will be interesting to see how the likes of Now Playing, Uptime, Server Status and Contacts Database do in the wordpress.org hall of fame.

After a recent report of incompatability of my calendar plugin with MySQL 4.0 I have refactored the 4.1 and above only queries to be much more backwards compatable. If you previously had problems installing the calendar (strings of SQL errors at the top of every page) then you might like to try reinstalling it. You can grab your updated copy from my programming page

If you discover any more bugs please continue to report them. This plugin is actively supported and I will update any and all bugs or errors discovered.

Thanks to all who have already installed and started using my plugin and to those who have thanked me personally in e-mail and over MSN.

I have done a quick update to my calendar plugin to include a CSS drop-down description when you hover over an event. This can be styled according to taste in the same way as the rest of the calendar. You can see this revised operation running on my calendar and you can grab your updated copy on my programming page. If you haven’t yet tried this plugin on your WordPress powered site, now is an excellent time to give it a go - you won’t be disappointed!

I am pleased to announce the release of the new improved calendar for WordPress, version 1.1. In addition to the previous features the calendar now supports recurring events on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis as well as the ability to specify a time of day for the events to occur. If you are looking for a personal planner for your blog or an events planner for your WordPress powered website you could do a lot worse than giving this plugin a try. You can see it action here or go straight to the download page. Thanks to Richard Brown for providing a financial incentive to code, release and support this improved version.