Ilya Gorodnyanskiy - IT-Blog » Web development

Comment Notifier Plugin for WordPress.

Ilya G. — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:34:46 +0000

Today I decided to try out Comment Notifier plugin for my WordPress. You’ll find now a checkbox “Notify me when new comments are added” under the comment form. At a first glance this plugin makes a good impression! It installed itself properly and after a little configuration it could send already notification mails! Great! The only shortcoming I could find so far is when you delete some comment, the email of the deleted author stays in the comment_notifier table. Personally I would expect, that the addresses of the potential spammers whould be also deleted from the notification list…

By the way, I’m positively impressed how easy it has got to install plugins in the latest version of WordPress! Only one click! In former versions one needed to copy a source code of a plugin in a particular folder on the server and to run a MySql script to create plugin tables in the database. Ok, it was not a great act….but still! Now this process is fully automatized!

Drupal, Plazes, GMap Module and some Speculations.

Ilya G. — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 21:08:09 +0000

Already two days I bear in mind an idea of creating a kind of a social network that would support GEO services. I have already introduced the German startup Plazes. What I don’t really like about this project is that for me as a consumer this service is too special. If I don’t want to use its main feature, so to deal with my current location, to define new places in the taxonomy etc. (and that’t not quite obvious, one should take a time to find out how this stuff works) Plazes platform is for me useless. To my opinion the “sociality”, so the interaction between users, the easy way to get to know each other should have the higher priority. I accept the GEO functionality as the feature, that can entertain the visitors. But in no way as the main component around which the community grows.

Looking through the modules for Drupal I found there a one, which is called Plazes. It’s not actually what makes me happy. This module connects you to the original Plazes site and gives back the information about users who are registered there. This is not that comfortable for the visitors of YOUR site, because first of all they have to deal with their Plazes account. And secondly why must they visit your site if they use already another service? What I’m thinking of, is the writing of the own simple module, that will allow users to define the places they are at on your website. It must be not difficult, just a simple database table, where the users ids are mapped to the places.

Drupal offers also a GMap module. According to the description it must show on the map the position of the given coordinates. It’s actually a gmap API that is embedded into Drupal engine. Unfortunately all the demo website don’t show the maps. The devoloper says that it must lie on the recent changes in the APIs. So if I’d tend to use google fascilities, I’ll have to look at the APIs myself.

Thus with the combination of the potential module and Google API one can realize funny features for the visitors of the potential community. Of course the idea is not ripe enough and I have to think about how to bring the sociality to the front. And what is more important is whether I find the time for the realization of my ambitions. Let’s see. If you have some ideas to this topic or just the mood to speculation about what could be if… , you are welcome!

JSSpamBlock Plugin for WordPress.

Ilya G. — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:23:47 +0000

Searching for a plugin for WordPress preventing spam bots to make comments to your postings, I found a really fine solution called JSSpamBlock plugin. If JavaScript support in your browser is turned off, you see a familiar input field where you have to put in a certain number when you are about to submit your comment. But if it’s on you don’t have to put in anything! The idea is very easy and very elegant. JavaScript does this work for you, it puts in the numer in the field and makes the field invisible. So the assumtion is that the spam bots don’t interprate JavaScript. Thus most of your human site visitors aren’t aware of the measures you took to protect yourself from spam bots. I have already installed this plugin on i-gorod and am really curious whether the idea works.

Shoutbox module in Drupal.

Ilya G. — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 06:35:33 +0000

Yesterday I made an effort to install Shoutbox module for the 5.x release of Drupal on my Life website. I was disappointed. In the former version this module was quite stable and offered a variety of features that the new version does not support anymore. What I really miss in the new version is the archive of shouts and the option to use the Shoutbox in a kind of static mode, so that when somebody writes a message and submits it, the page is loaded again. Now it’s realised with AJAX and does not function properly in all browsers. For example in IE7 after the submition of the first message everything is ok, but when you write again and submi,t your design is completely crashed. This is a bug and was already reported several times, but still there is no fix for it.

Drupal’s Image_Galleries Module.

Ilya G. — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 13:22:29 +0000

I was pleasantly surprised having installed the current version of Drupal’s Image Galleries Module on my Life website. Two years ago this module was pretty buggy and one had to invest much time to make it work properly. I can’t state that the range of features that Galleries module offeres nowadays became really wide. If i’m not mistaken the only innovative thing is the import of images from a directory. But you can simply install this module, and it works!

What I still didn’t find out is how to change the look of the Image node. For example I want to display the taxonomy terms like the name of the Image Gallery to which the current Image belongs after the image and not before. It seems to me that it has nothing to do with the Imge or Image Gallery modules. The truth lies somewhere in taxonomy or system modules.

Snap shots for the links on your web site.

Ilya G. — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 22:14:15 +0000

Snap shots is an online service that generates and shows a preview of web sites that are linked on your page. Each time the mouse cursor is moved over the link there appears a preview window. To use the service you should go to Snap shots web site and proceed four steps. First of all you configure the look and feel of the preview window, so that it stays in harmony with the desing of your own site. Then you are asked to enter the url of your site and your email. In the third step you get the link to the script file. And at last the link has to be integrated into your code. There are actually several ways to do this. On my site I just added the link-tag to the header. For the users of WordPress it is possible to download and install the Snap shots plugin. How to do that please refer to the plugin site.

I installed Snap shots on i-gorod several hours ago just to see how good it works. Well, in general I’m quite satisfied, but in details not that much. The loading process of the preview can take sometimes up to 5 seconds. That’s of course a disadvantage. Several times the preview just was not loaded, so that the preview window was white. After refresh Snap shots functioned again. If the enumerated aspects bear a constant character, I’ll have to take out Snap shots from my site.

WordPress at the First Glance.

Ilya G. — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 22:54:18 +0000

Before building up my web site I hadn�t practical opportunity to get acquainted with WordPress. There are a lot of positive opinions about this CMS in the internet. To form my own opinion to this topic was actually one of the motivations to make WordPress to the base of i-gorod.

First of all I�d like to mention one negative aspect. I didn�t like the structure and the organisation of the WordPress web site (http:// wordpress.org). It was not immediately clear where to start, where the plugins can be found and it seemed to me quite exaggerated with all the introduction texts, that should help a one with orientation on the web site, but indeed they just harmed the general usability. Well that just my humble opinion. Let�s go on�

No wonder that I took the latest version of WordPress. At current moment it is 2.1. The installation was really easy. If one follows exactly the instructions from the readme.html, that is shipped with WordPress, less then in 3 minutes you have already a functioning platform. I found it nice that the administrator could define the prefix of the database tables, so that more then one instance of WordPress can run on the same database. Well, you may say it�s a standard feature that is offered by almost all modern CMS, but still I find such care about the user very kind.

The next step was to integrate my own design into WordPress. On this stage I was pleasantly surprise how easy it is! I�m a lazy man, so I copied already existing theme into new directory. Afterward one needs to go through all the files in this directory and make changes. The structure of the theme files (header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php etc.) is quite obvious, so even for a newcomer in html programming it would be no real challenge.

The administration part of WordPress I found quit satisfying. Only one moment is annoying. I�m not happy that much, when an application or software platform thinks, that it knows better what I want to see on the main page. In WordPress I didn�t find so far the possibility to configure the main page of administration (dashboard) and how to switch off the WordPress news and blogs.

As for the performance of WordPress concerned, I can�t say anything so far. The time will show. Neither I have tested some additional plugins. Surely I’ll change my experience here, when I have some info on this questions on the hand.

In the conclusion I want to say that WordPress makes a nice impression at the first glance. It’s very friendly and simple to use. For such little sites as mine, where you want to have a blog and some static pages WordPress is more then enough. If you want your site to be best equiped with forums, chat rooms, photo galaries etc. then I guess you would need something more professional like Drupal (http://drupal.org).