Linked Pages Version 0.2.3 has just been released. This version adds a menu facility which uses the current posts ‘link field’ content to find pages that are also linked to the parent page (allowing a more menu like operation from the widget). The configuration of this feature is available on the widget control panel in the ‘Search For Similar’ section.

As usual, it’s available from the WordPress plugin directory, comments/questions can be left here and the somewhat sparse wiki is available here.

Seems my collection of plug-ins is growing…. enter Linked Pages. This was created in response to a user request, but more on that later when he’s finished his site.

Linked Pages allows you to create page pickers in the post editor which can link a post to a parent using custom fields. These links can then be displayed using the widget contained in the plug-in.

At the moment, it is primarily designed for use with custom post types (these make it easy to select pages for the pickers) and each page can only be linked to one parent of a particular post type using a given custom field. As time allows, I plan on extending it to provide more functionality (like being able to establish multiple links and an improved widget with more options).

As an example usage, lets say you’re a mad football fan… you create a post type ‘Football Clubs’ and one called ‘Players’. Using Linked Pages, you can link players to their club and have a list of players for that club displayed in your sidebar in seconds.

The wiki is a little incomplete (by that I mean there is a holding page) so I’ll be adding to that as time allows. As usuals, comments etc. can be left here.

I was going to write a review, but for things like Redmine, I find reviews aren’t necessarily the right outlet for useful information. The same could be said of any review, but for software development tools there are a lot more variables than say… if you like platformers, give this game a go. So instead of a review, this is just a collection of my initial thoughts about Redmine, my first real brush with Ruby and Rails.

For the uninitiated, Redmine is “a flexible project management web application. Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database”. Nice summary I think. So what does it provide…

Access to a number of version control repositories (Mercurial, Git and Subversion to name three) as well as scanning of commit messages to extract time spent and issues addressed by the commit
Issue tracking (each project can utilise a number of different trackers for things like bugs and features, each with it’s own configuration)
File and Document stores
Activity reporting
Gantt charts
Multiple project support

The list of features is quite extensive so I would recommend reading the Redmine website for full details.

Installation was fairly easy. I installed my instance on a Linux server running Fedora 8, MySQL 4.1 (for development, MySQL 5 is required but more on that later), Apache 2 and Subversion 1.5.something. All of which were already setup. Setting up Ruby was a snap, as were the base requirements for Redmine, largely due to the ease of using Ruby’s Gems. The one thing I had a problem with was setting up Passenger (which was one of the recommended routes in one of the how-to’s on the Redmine site). However, once that was sorted, it was up and running in a very short space of time.

The user interface on Redmine is pretty neat. Not bogged down in flashy garbage that serves no purpose. The standard templates are clean and crisp and the layouts of the pages are all pretty good. There one or two quirks, like the fact that files ask for a description when you add them to the store but it’s only displayed as a hint when you mouse over the filename (actually easily fixed with a minor tweak). Overall though, it’s one of the nicest interfaces on an application of this nature that I’ve seen.

One of the nice features about Redmine is the plugin system. There are numerous plugins out there, so far I’ve stuck to the ones that are listed officially on the Redmine site. Once I got my system up and running I went hunting for a whiteboard style plugin. I elected to use the Backlogs plugin, I don’t really recall why, but so far I’ve not been disappointed (my only complaints at this point are the fact that when you enter a new story from the backlog you only provide it’s title and not an accompanying description, it only works 100% on Chrome). This was where I had problems setting up… it requires the rmagick gem which in turn has a dependency on ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick (IIRC). Getting this side of things setup was a nightmare. My recommendation would be install ImageMagick from source and use that as that actually worked first time (I spent an age hunting RPMs and trying to resolve dependencies). Once that hurdle was out of the way however, it took no time at all to enable it and hook it up to a project.

I’ve been using Mantis for ages and I would, until I got Redmine running, have picked it over anything else for issue tracking. But thats all it really does… yes it has roadmaps and change logs and you can integrate it with Dokuwiki (nightmare – the integration, not Dokuwiki) and Subversion (IIRC this requires the use of Subversion hooks). Redmine does all of that out of the box, ok, so the wiki isn’t expandable like Dokuwiki which is IMHO one of, if not the, best wiki packages around, but everything else is just there, integrated into a single neat solution.

So far it’s all positive, so lets add a little bit of negative to the mix for some balance. My gripes… firstly once an issue is created you can’t edit the title or description… actually, I’ve just looked again to make sure I didn’t embarrass myself by missing something and sure enough… I found it, although it’s not obvious… update the issue and there is a ‘(more)’ link on the ‘Change Properties’ section of the page… click it and the description etc. are displayed for editing… a bit more positivity then… negatives… off the top, apart from the issue I mentioned above with the file store list, I can’t really find anything to criticise. Clearly if I was writing a review then we’re in the running for a good score, but it’s largely meaningless as I’m raving about Redmine because right now, it fits my needs remarkably well, your mileage may vary so my advice would be to setup your own test instances of the products you’re thinking of using and actually use them in anger. Possibly in parallel so you can compare how each one fares against the others. I decided I would setup Redmine and use it in anger to get a real feel for how it works and what it can do and it was a good decision as I’ve found it so much easier to get along with than say Mantis.

Now lets get down to the nitty gritty… if you’re a software engineer, there’s a good chance you’ll want to tweak Redmine to make it fit. There are a lot of configuration options built in but if they don’t cut it, then you’ll have to dive into the code and sort it yourself or use one of the many plugins that are already out there. I was a bit apprehensive when I dived into the code. Ruby and Rails scared me a little when I looked at them a while back, but having seen what’s possible with a relatively small amount of code it’s easy to understand why it’s a nice tool to use. If you want to tinker with the Redmine codebase just make sure you’re proficient with Ruby and Rails before you start. That said, I was able to add a new field to one of the core tables, collect data for it and have it used within another area of he application without too many hitches but it did take me a long time (mostly due to on-the-fly research about Ruby and Rails). For anyone thats interested, the patch I submitted add’s a flag to the project repository settings that allow you to include a repository in a scheduled fetch (I have a local repos which is scanned every 5 minutes and I use a remote repos which is too big to scan every 5 minutes). The patch can be found here.

So what about all the other project management toys I’ve tinkered with over the years? Well, they are all pretty good in their own way and for the people who originally created them, but for me they’ve just never seemed… well… right. I’m not saying Redmine is perfect, because it’s not and I’m not saying everyone should use it, because they shouldn’t, but it is pretty dammed good at what it does and if you’re looking for a software project management solution, I’d definitely recommend you have a look at it and give it a real live try out.

Quick update on ACFW Version 1.0… I’ve not stopped development, but unfortunately it does take a back seat when I’m busy and I’ve been really busy lately. Most of the backend is done, including the configuration conversion which handles the pre 1.0 configuration and should handle updates to the configuration gracefully in the future.

All that’s left to do is actually create the tables and forms that are going to be used to manage the configuration. I can’t remember what I’ve posted about features, but it includes it’s own RSS feed reader that looks at the ACFW RSS feed produce by my blog, so you’ll get the latest news about ACFW right there in your WordPress admin pages, along with links to my wiki etc. for easy access to the latest documentation.

By popular demand I have released a slightly modified version of ACFW (in the form of version 0.99) which processes shortcodes that are contained in the generated content. The latest version can of course be downloaded from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

This is a minor bug fix release that addresses an issue when using the content generator that resulted in the linefeeds being mishandled and displayed as ‘n’.

Thanks to Deena for letting me know about this issue.

The latest version, as always, can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin directory.

Time for another update on the progress of version 1.0.0.

The widget renderer is now largely complete, that is, the configuration converter has successfully converted the old pre 1.0.0 configuration on my test system and is rendering all my test widgets as expected. Some further modification is required to handle the customised HTML wrapping features, but that’s a minor job replacing some hard coded HTML with variable references.

The first admin page is finished. This is the plugin home page in the WordPress control panel. It provides some configuration statistics, the credits and copyright notices, some key version information and a news feed direct from my blog for all things ACFW, so it will be easier for me to post updates and know that the widgets users can keep up to date with whats going on. Checkout the screenshot below.

The next stage is to create the pages that will be used to manage the various elements (blocks, groups, wrappers and list separators), the two widget control panels that will be used to manage block and group widgets when they are added to sidebars and finally, implement the remaining renderers for the group widget and the various shortcodes and theme functions that are going to be provided.

That’s it for now.

Well, seems like only earlier today that I was announcing that I’m working on ACFW Version 1.0 and here I am posting an update.

First up, I’ve added a dedicated ACFW RSS feed to the site (I’ve tested with Firefox and IE and it is accessible using their built in RSS feed tools). I am looking to include an RSS feed display on the widget’s home page in the admin control panel so I can send messages to users about work in progress, updates, possible features etc.

After much thought about structure and optimisations, I took another look and thought I could do better, so I’ve restructured the configuration storage mechanism and the overall structure of the code to try and minimise database access and the amount of code loaded for each request and fixed up one or two issues I was having with compatibility.

On the subject of compatibility, I’m concious that I’ve been developing solely for my supported platform which is PHP 5. WordPress however can run on PHP 4, so where appropriate, I’m implementing PHP 4 and PHP 5 specific code (this is mainly centered around classes and the improved class model provided by PHP 5+). WordPress compatibility is something else I’m going to be looking at, possibly setting up a test bed system that provides various different versions of WordPress starting with version 2.5 (as this is the current minimum version). At the moment though, the widget is limited to WordPress 2.8+ as it uses one or two things that were added in 2.8.

So that’s it for now, I’ll post some more as appropriate.

Now I’m holiday for a while, I’m catching up on some of the jobs I’ve been meaning to do. One of those is the next major release of my Advanced Custom Field Widget for WordPress.

This is a complete rewrite of the widget, not just further modifications to the base code that began life as Scott Wallick’s ‘Custom Field Widget’ just over two years ago. In that time, there have been many additions and as a result, many ideas that have been festering in my head for far too long.

So, what can you expect from ACFW Version 1.0.0?

• Dedicated admin pages – Instead of the ever expanding widget control panel, ACFW is getting it’s own management pages. The widget control panel will of course still be present, but it will merely piece together a widget instance from the other elements.
• HTML configuration – The widget as it stands uses various items of hard coded HTML, and will, when using the shortcode and/or theme function, be lacking some key HTML elements. This is changing to allow you greater control over the generated HTML.
• Reusable elements – Instead of having to specify common things (such as the new HTML configuration or the list item separators) each time they are used, the new widget will provide tools to manage these and then simply select the required item.

However, the biggest change by far is the restructuring of the configuration data. At present, each widget instance has it’s own configuration data. In most cases this is fine as the widget will only occur once, but in some cases (when using the widget index functionality for example), re-entering the same configuration for each instance can be a real drag. To improve things, the concept of Widgets, Blocks and Groups is being introduced.

• Widgets – A widget is, as the name suggests, a single sidebar widget. This references either a block or a group.
• Blocks – A block is a single instance of the data required to generate the content. Blocks can be used by widgets, the shortcode and the theme function.
• Groups – A group is simply a list of member blocks. When a group is requested, the widget will pick one of the member blocks at random.

I’ve been getting ever more concerned about the speed of the widget, it doesn’t have to do a lot, but shifting large blocks of configuration around every time the widget is generated (amongst other things) is not the best use of CPU time (even if there is an abundance of clock cycles these days), especially if, like me, you have a lot of different widget instances. As a result, I’m spending some time trying to optimise the widget to reduce the processing time… caching the configuration is one such step. Gone is the virtual sidebar previously needed if you wanted to use the shortcode or theme functions without having to display the widget. Now all you need do is setup a block and use that (or a group if you wish).

And don’t worry your existing configuration… whilst I’m not prepared to offer a guarantee that it will be 100% correct, I have a fairly complicated setup on my development machine and that’s converted 100% without any issues, so suffice to say I’m fairly confident.

That’s about all I can say right now, so stay tuned for further updates, which will hopefully be the release announcement.

Version 0.97 of ACFW has been released. This is a fix for the plugin directory issue that has prevented new versions being recognised by the directory and consequently users blogs.

Download the latest version from the WordPress Plugin Directory.