Bring Your Own Terms Of Service

How would we build galactic-scale beacons to attract the attention of extraterrestrials?

Paul Gibbs — Mon, 27 May 2013 00:11:09 +0000

Back in the day, I ran the old SETI Online program on my computer (over 56k dial-up!) to help to try to detect signals made by another civilisation. Best as I know, we haven’t found ET yet, but until today I’ve never even considered what effort it would take us to send such a beacon out to the galaxy.

This interesting presentation by James Benford on Youtube (paper) has a bunch of thought-provoking ideas about this.

BuddyPress Translations 1.6f

Paul Gibbs — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 14:09:13 +0000

Version 1.6f of BuddyPress Translations has been released. 1.6f comes with an updated Slovak translation.

Continued big thanks to all the polyglots who contribute the translations for BuddyPress; maybe we should see about adding automatic download of language files to a future version of BuddyPress

Achievements 3 for WordPress now available

Paul Gibbs — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 22:43:36 +0000

After an extremely long time in development, I’m very pleased to be finally able to announce Achievements 3 for WordPress. Go grab it from WordPress.org!

Learn more about the plugin on achievementsapp.com.

BuddyPress Translations 1.6e

Paul Gibbs — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 14:38:46 +0000

Version 1.6e of BuddyPress Translations has been released. 1.6e comes with new French and Hungarian translations, and the latest versions of all the other translations (noticeably, Spanish!).

Big thanks to all the polyglots who contribute the translations for BuddyPress.

I’m joining Automattic

Paul Gibbs — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 17:13:25 +0000

I’ve been very fortunate to have worked at The Telegraph since April 2011; it was my first “real” development job, and as I said in an email to my (ex-)colleagues earlier today, I’ve enjoyed my time there and I’m very proud of what we were able to accomplish together. However, I’m after a new challenge, and so I’m moving on.

I’m extremely pleased to announce that I’ve joined Automattic as a Code Wrangler, joining their VIP team. I’m very excited to be working for such a great company, which is full of awesome and inspiring people, and I can’t wait to get started!

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a very happy christmas and a great new year; 2013 is going to be awesome!

Getting phpDoc into WordPress

Paul Gibbs — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 21:51:33 +0000

phpDoc to WordPress exports documentation generated by phpDocumentor into WordPress. Start using it today.

The best way to produce useful documentation for PHP code is to annotate it with phpDoc tags and keywords. Based on javadoc, phpDoc goes beyond a straightforward description of what something does, and allows the developer to add extra information which will help others who read the code to quickly understand its most important aspects. For example, a function can marked up to say when it was added to a project, its arguments types, and its return values.

From this phpDoc markup, the phpDocumentor app is the best way to generate standalone documentation that you can distribute with your project or make available as a reference on your website. But what happens when you want this documentation inside your WordPress?

Documentation generated by the phpDocumentor app does not aim to be a replacement for conventional developer documentation, but supplements it. If we only consider developer documentation for example, there should still be a place for user contributed documentation such as helpful observations or usage examples.

My two preferred ways of doing this are either wikis or using a CMS that everyone can publish to. Wikis, of course, are all about a collaborative approach to writing; WordPress’ documentation, the Codex, uses MediaWiki. bbPress and BuddyPress take the other approach, and both use a WordPress site in which every user is an Editor. I note that the upcoming WordPress Handbooks are built inside WordPress.

For my Achievements plugin, I decided to use my WordPress site as a place for my developer and user documentation, and I wanted to start by getting the class, function, and method documentation generated by phpDocumentor into WordPress.

The solution I am releasing today consists of a XSLT script that reads an XML file from phpDocumentor, which contains the structure of the phpDoc markup, and transforms it into a WordPress export file ready for import onto your WordPress site. Browse the Achievements documentation to see an example.

If you want to try this on your own project, read the phpDoc to WordPress instructions to get started. I’d like to thank @laurabygaslight for help getting started with the XSLT; any egregious mistakes in it are all my fault.

Where does this tool go from here? If there’s interest, I’d like to investigate ways of easily giving people a good WordPress-powered documentation site, but it depends on how well this is received, and if anyone wants to collaborate. Get in touch!

WP Re-Importer 1.1

Paul Gibbs — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 11:33:31 +0000

WP Re-Importer 1.1 is now available, and contains the following improvements:

Checks for existing posts during import now compares the post name rather than post title.
Fix post meta being duplicated on multiple imports.
Allow imported posts’ post_parent to be set to a post not in the import (e.g. an existing post).

The 1.0 release was only a few days ago, so if this is the first time you’ve heard of WP Re-Importer, it’s a fork of the standard WordPress Importer plugin and adds the following features:

Importing content that already exists will add the new version as a post revision.
A default parent post can be set for content that doesn’t have a hierarchy defined in the WordPress export file.

If you don’t need these features, you should use the standard WordPress Importer. Download WP Re-Importer 1.1 today from WordPress.org.

New Plugin — WP Re-Importer

Paul Gibbs — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 21:11:04 +0000

I’ve released a new plugin today; say hello to WP Re-Importer. As a fork of the standard WordPress Importer plugin, WP Re-Importer adds the following features:

Importing content that already exists will add the new version as a post revision
A default parent post can be set for content that doesn’t have a hierarchy defined in the WordPress export file

If you don’t need these features, you should use the standard WordPress Importer. Download WP Re-Importer today from WordPress.org.

BuddyPress Translations 1.6d

Paul Gibbs — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 10:55:37 +0000

Version 1.6d of BuddyPress Translations has been released. 1.6d comes with new Danish and Chinese (Taiwan) translations. Big thanks to all the polyglots who contribute the translations for BuddyPress.

BP Labs 1.3

Paul Gibbs — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 17:43:10 +0000

I’ve just released version 1.3 of BP Labs; it’s a plugin which contains unofficial and experimental BuddyPress features for testing and feedback. Long overdue, the update fixes a problem with autosuggest, and introduces a new feature: Like Button.

Like Button requires the Activity component, and simply adds a “Like” button onto WordPress’ Toolbar when viewing a blog post (or any other post types). Likes are grouped together and shown in the Activity stream. It’s pretty simple, but fun. Let me know what you think of it.

Get BP Labs 1.3 today!