Morning Caffeine

I love plugins and wordpress is pretty much well supported with various plagins. You name it and you’ll find it. Right now, I’m in a hunt for new plugins to try out, and this is the list of which I have active at the moment:

1. Ask me plugin – of course, Do I have to say more?
2. Exec-PHP – I wouldn’t use this one if Ask me plugin doesn’t require it. Hopefully, we should be able to disable it, one ask me is rewritten to not use it.
3. Get Recent Comments – This one does what it says - I use it for my second column in the footer.
4. Recent Posts – Same as above – I use it for my first column in footer.
5. Feedburner Feed Replacement – this one I use for forwarding all feed traffic to feedburner. This way you get a better picture of how much subscribers to your feed you have.
6. iG:Syntax Hiliter – One of the best syntax highlighter plugins I have seen. (Yesterday I realized that an online friend of an online friend has a friend who is the author of this plugin. That just proves how world is a small place.). One thing I noticed with this plugin is that its setting are restored to default each time you activate another plugin.
7. Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form – This one I use for my Contact page. Very nice form with a spam protection. Like their authors say: A marriage of communication and peace-of-mind.
8. Custom Smileys – I love custom smilies. I guess you can tell from my posts.
9. Akismet – A spam protection for post comments. So far, it works great for me.
10. Tiger Style Administration - one more great plugin from orderedlist.com and Steve Smith. It gives you new design to your Wordpress administration.
11. Hello Dolly – I have no idea why I activated this plugin, but it’s kind of cool. It displays random lyrics from Louis Armstrong’s song “Hello Dolly”.

So far, this is it. If you have some cool plugins to recommend, please do, I will be happy to check them out.

Ask-me plugin, which was released almost a month ago, requires Exec-PHP plugin to be installed (hopefully beta release will make plugin independent, and you won’t need exec-php anymore). However, in my last post, I wanted to show up some php code. Exec-php plugin allows you to put some php code within your post and execute it once the page is loaded. On the other hand, it doesn’t allow you to actually show your code. I went to authors page for the solution and he suggested that instead < and > in opening and closing php tags you use corresponding html entities (<?php ?> to <?php ?>). I tried that, but as I also have Gi:Hiliter plugin (which is very nice for syntax highlighting), it actually showed <?php ?> html entities preventing them to be interpreted.

I figured I should try to hack Exec-php to ignore that single post I wrote, and I did, but my friend Ed actually suggested that I put html comment inside each post which will contain php code which doesn't need to be executed and just change Exec-php the way when it finds out that comment, it will just return the content and not execute the code.

This is the function which I changed:

Works perfectly! All you need to do is to place this:

on the beginning of your post if you'd like to show some php code to your visitors.

We finally made it. So, what it is all about. If you have visited my "About" page, you probably noticed that it is not an ordinary page. It gives visitors an opportunity to ask blog owner a question and see all questions from other visitors. The idea and initial plugin came from my dear friend Sara who wrote it for her personal use. Once I started this blog, I talked her into giving me the script so I can have different About page. After some talking we decided to extend it a little bit and made it public for all people who are willing to have similar About page as we do, but are not able to write code themselves. This turned into hours of hard work and finally, you can see results of it.

So, here it is, first alpha release is now available for you to use it. However, I presume there are some bugs that we are still not aware of, but we do promise we'll keep this plugin evolve and become better.

Plugin should work on both Wordpress 1.5 and 2.0 versions, however there are some requirements for it to run on your blog. Exec-PHP plugin is required. You can download it here. Please make sure you activated it and configured it properly. Some other requirements are:

a. Disable the WYSIWYG rich editor within the user options (at the bottom of the page)
b. Disable "WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically"

Make sure your permalink structure is name based rather than using the post id.

Here are the installation instructions:

1. Download plugin from here
2. Extract archive (you should see 2 files (askme.php and ask-me-readme.txt) on your local drive
3. Upload askme.php into your Wordpress plugin directory
4. Go to your admin control panel and activate the plugin.

Plugin should create a page "Ask me" for you which should be ready for usage. Under the Options/Ask me, you will find few settings you can configure by yourself.

I strongly suggest that you read ask-me-readme.txt

Give it a try, and leave us some feedback. We have more ideas for extending this plugin, but for now, we are hoping to fix all possible bugs we still haven't discovered, but which might be present.

Happy New Year, people! This is our gift for all of you.