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!
I’ve been trying out Google+ for almost three weeks now, and so far I kind of like it. I don’t see it replacing Facebook or Twitter just yet, but overall it seems like it could be here to stay.
One interesting thing I stumbled across today is the possibility to link your Google+ account to certain search results by making use of the rel=”author” and rel=”me” attributes on links. Here’s the article that explains it all:
How to implement rel=”author”
I tried implementing this myself, and this post will hopefully be my first to show up in Google with my avatar next to it. I used the rel=”author” link both on my username above a post (it should say ‘posted by Stephan’ below the title of this pot) and in the sidebar, so let’s see how quick Google picks it up.
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 »
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 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.
Today I stumbled upon an article by ImpressiveWebs about the difference between :before and ::before in CSS3. I had wondered about this before, so the article was actually an interesting read.
In summary, the difference is that in CSS 2.1 pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes are both targeted using the single colon (:before). In CSS3 however, a distinction is made between the both, pseudo-elements now being prefixed with two colons (::before).
Why? Not sure, but as Louis points out the rule may have come a little too late anyway. Because a lot of pseudo-elements were already introduced in CSS 2.1, backwards compatibility will have to be ensured by supporting the single-colon version as well. Anyway, more about that in the original post: What’s the Difference Between “:before” and “::before”?
Not surprisingly, one of the comments implied (unless I misunderstood the speaker) not being able to actually tell the difference between a pseudo-class and a pseudo-element. This too is something I’ve been wondering about, but which I found the answer to a couple of weeks back. Read the rest of this entry »