WPMU Dev (Premium) approaching their ton

In one of my other lives… that’s outside of my paying job at Xero I love working on WordPress, WordPress MU (WPMU) and BuddyPress projects.

A site, that in an ideal world I would be able to take advantage of, called WPMU DEV Premium is just about to hit the milestone of having 100 plugins, themes and videos for use with WordPress MU and the BuddyPress.  As with so many it seems, I can’t afford the outlay for a membership as none of my projects are profit bearing. If I could justify the cost however there is one plugin in particular that I see real value in:

Supporter

The Supporter plugin provides a seemless way to integrate a paid upgrades feature similar to the wordpress.com upgrades system, in fact WPMU DEV Premium also offer a plugin called Upgrades that does EXACTLY what the wordpress.com system does using a system of credits as opposed to supporters paypal $ based system. This is a feature which with the exception of Supporter has been sorely missing in the WPMU world so this definately fills a significant gap in the market. The only thing that would make this plugin a complete no-brainer for me would be support for BuddyPress and I’m sure that’s not far away!

Now if I could just find the money for a subscription perhaps I could start monetising some of these projects!

Congratulations James and Andrew on reaching the Ton!

WordPress Smart Archives Reloaded… with added Fancy!

I was working on a WordPress theme recently, for a site with a not insignificant volume of posts, and found myself needing a fancy, more user friendly way of presenting the archives.

After a search of the WordPress extend repository I came across Smart Archives Reloaded by Scribu, an evolution of the original Smart Archives by Justin Blanton and while it didn’t quite achieve what I was aiming for I could see the potential to get where I was going… so I rolled up my sleeves, put my php hat and started coding.

The new fancy archive is built using a multi-level implementation of the jQuery.Tools tab control and also adds post categories and dates to the list of output tags available. After a couple of days of tweaking and testing I got in touch with Scribu to present “Super” Smart Archives Reloaded. Needless to say he loved it and offered to roll it into the core plugin.

So from version 1.7 of Smart Archives Reloaded you too can now take advantage of the “fancy” archives option and enjoy the smartest archives on the web!

You can see the archive in action here or go download it and try it for yourself… it’s as simple as upload, activate and view, and it even comes with a simple default style!

This is only my second WordPress plugin and my first to see the light of day and it feels great to give something back to the WordPress community. Thanks to Scribu for including my work in the plugin.

Apple’s New iPods: Why I’m not buying…

apple

A couple months ago during a two week period I’d really rather forget (that started with my car being stolen!) my 1st gen iPod Nano, that has served me faithfully for over 5 years, decided it was going to have a bit of a melt down. It still  “kinda” works but only 40% of the screen is visibible and it now has frequent memory loss issues, forgetting both where it was in podcasts and music tracks as well as sometime what it has stored in it’s memory.

Being pretty close to the expected September iPod announcements I figured it made sense to wait to replace it with a next generation model. So after struggling on with my disabled little friend for two more months I was, to say the least, pretty dissappointed with what Apple rolled out last week, and it seems I’m not the only one.

I am stunned that Apple would decided to roll out not one but two pieces of much anticipated and, in the case of FM radio, for me pretty desireable functionality in it’s now low-end Nano range and not make that same upgrade to the high-end iPod Touch.

Having been thinking that I would go for the mid-sized iTouch when the new models were announced my initial reaction was that this made that purchase decision much harder. Having thought about it over the past few days however I have actually come to the conclusion that it makes the choice easy. I’m not going to buy either… If, as has been suggested by numerous sources, the camera upgrade to the iPod Touch was held back for technical reasons one could also suggest that perhaps other functionality was also held back as part of that same upgrade, such as the FM radio feature, and that those features might be rolled out a few months down the road. Either way, as long as my trusty crippled iPod Nano continues to “Kinda” work I saw no compelling upgrade path with last weeks announcements so sorry Apple, “I’m not buyin’ it!”

Stop SOPA