Once in a while you’re forced to support Internet Explorer 7. Even though its share is only 1.29% for the site I’m currently working on, the amount of visitors is so vast that even that small percentage accounts for hundreds of thousands of pageviews per month. Which means we can’t just yet afford to drop support.
One problem I kept encountering was that of using display: inline-block. In all modern browsers this is supported, and often it’s a lot more useful than using floats. The problem once again though is IE7′s support for it. Read the rest of this entry »
For a while now I’ve been using the plugin SEO Slugs on several blogs, to make sure no unnecessary words end up in my URLs. However, this plugin still only exists in English, and I really needed one in Dutch.
So, I scoured the web for lists of Dutch stopwords, and combined those to make a Dutch version of the plugin. I’d like to make an internationalized version that contains multiple word lists, and I may do so in the future, but for now here’s just a Dutch version of the SEO Slugs plugin.
Download SEO Slugs Dutch for WordPress.
The current list counts 131 words, but suggestions and updates are always welcome of course (in the comments or to @Litso_). To see a working example of this plugin visit denkeensna.nl
Hey folks who came here from Google, looking for my phpBB and bbPress plugins. Sorry, I currently do NOT support these plugins.
They are still up for download, and there’s plenty of comments on the posts to help you out with the basic problems. I do know that they are both flawed, but I’m not able to support them at the moment. First of all, I simply don’t have the time to spend on this blog and the plugins. Second, I don’t run any forums anymore so I don’t use either phpBB or bbPress anymore. Third, I’m not a PHP developer and I just don’t know how to fix them, and I lack the motivation (see the previous points) to delve into it.
I might start blogging again in the future, and I won’t delete this site because there’s still people coming in here that can use my plugins. If anyone manages to fix them though, please do let me know and I’ll upload the new version and give due credits 
That’s all folks!
The Marilyn Manson wiki I’ve been running for a couple of years now recently suffered from massive attacks of spam. We’ve had those before, but previously we’ve always been able to stop those with plugins like ConfirmEdit. This time however, both ConfirmEdit and SimpleAntiSpam were no match for the spammers.
It was time to come up with something new, and I don’t mean making the CAPTCHA extremely hard. Because to be honest, Captcha’s Suck.
A while ago I stumbled across a website called KittenAuth, a CAPTCHA-like plugin that asks visitors to select three kittens from an array of 9 images. I immediately liked the concept, and I’m actually surprised I haven’t seen it used that much yet.
One thing I didn’t like though was the size of the block of images. The website itself doesn’t have any screenshots (strange), but you can see plenty of examples at Google images. Also, as easy as it is for us humans to identify a cat, I think the 3×3 grid makes it pretty tough to identify all the kittens at a glance. And then we’re back at why CAPTCHA’s suck: it takes several seconds to figure out the correct answer.
Anyway, my idea was to develop a KittenAuth plugin for MediaWiki that is strong enough to stop the spam flood, but easy enough for humans not to take several seconds to solve. And so I did:
Read the rest of this entry »
Disclaimer: I do not support this plugin.
After my recent adventures with phpBB I’ve decided to switch to bbPress. phpBB has served me well for a while, but there are two major downsides: you can’t use custom PHP inside your template, and to install plugins you have to edit a lot of the core files. The latter especially sucks, so I went looking around for a better piece of forum software.
bbPress
bbPress seemed like a good choice: small, easily customizable and a very usable admin panel. Unfortunately development has been rather slow lately and some basic functions you’d expect on a forum are still missing. Fortunately though, it’s so easily customizable and looks a lot like WordPress (which I have plenty experience with) that I was able to write some plugins of my own.
One of the most important missing pieces to me was the ability to hide a section of the forums from certain usergroups. As an admin, I want to have a place where I can discuss ongoing projects and other administrative activities with my fellow admins without everyone reading along. So I made a plugin that allows me to hide forums from usergroups I specifiy in the admin panel.
(if you don’t care about this story just jump to the download link)
Read the rest of this entry »
If you use the Simple Facebook Connect plugin for WordPress (and I really do recommend using it), you might have noticed that you will get an error message each time you login to the admin panel.
Notice: you're using the auto-generated password for your account. Would you like to change it to something you'll remember easier?
This is not just something admins see: every user can access certain parts of the WP admin panel, for instance when they want to change their settings. Usually this warning would be pretty useful too, but if you use Facebook Connect to login you will never ever use or have to change your password. This means the warning is totally useless, and should just be hidden.
I wrote a small plugin that does just that: hide the generated password error for users that login using Facebook (or as WordPress itself calls it, “default password nagging”).
Read the rest of this entry »
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m trying to get a phpBB forum to allow user registrations using Facebook Connect. So far all looks good, so I’ll explain how I managed to do this.
Disclaimer: I do not support this plugin.
Also, I did not develop this plugin and cannot guarantuee that it’s safe.
Having said that, if you’re as stubborn (or desperate for a Facebook plugin for phpBB) as I am, keep on reading. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently a question on Pro Webmasters was posed regarding people’s toolsets when webdeveloping. Unfortunately, that site is still relatively quiet (compared to it’s sisters StackOverflow, SuperUser, etc.) so there has not been a lot discussion. I figured it might be interesting to post my toolset here as well. So, here is what I ideally have at hand when I try to make a website:
Developing:
Software:
- Zend Development Environment
- FileZilla
- EditPlus if needed
- Photoshop
Read the rest of this entry »
Update: I’ve written a tutorial for installing Facebook Connect for phpBB: Facebook Connect for phpBB.
So the past days I’ve been trying to get FaceBook Connect working for phpBB 3. I still haven’t got it working, but at least I found a tutorial that is supposed to help me out:
phpBB3 Facebook Connect step by step
Near the end though a zipfile is linked that is supposed to contain the actual plugin. However, the creator of the plugin has disappeared, and so has his website http://svmods.com. Not only is the plugin not supported anymore, the zipfile has gone completely.
Stubborn as I am, I still want to give the plugin a try, even though it’s been abandonded. So, I did some research and found the original zipfile. For anyone who’s interested I uploaded it here: svmods_facebook_connect_for_phpbb.zip
Disclaimer
As I said, the plugin is abandonded. I cannot guarantuee it will work, or if it’s safe to use if it does work. I will post updates here when I find out more, please do let me know what your experience is with this plugin!
A comment on my blog today:
Have to say I loved This article. Writing for my own blog when I find the time – It is the comments questions that keep me interested and know that I am reaching someone more than a search spider or someone looking to sell something in the comments.
From someone called ‘Maternity Clothes’ with an obscure emailaddress and a link to a maternity clothes webshop. Oh, the irony.