Marcus Pope

Husband, Father, Inventor, Programmer Highlands Ranch, CO - °

Wordpress Support Page

Welcome

Updated on January 28th, 2013

So I was out for the birth of my daughter, then when I was ready to get back to supporing my plugins I was selected for jury duty. Then when I was back from that and caught up on personal todos collected while being in a week-long trial, me, my wife and our daughter were attacked by the flu, and finally after yet more time to re-catch up I’m finally ready to start fixing these pesky little WordPress bugs. Here is the order in which they will be fixed:

Root Relative Urls:

Add www/non-www redirection notes to readme. I’ll add the .htaccess rules necessary to restore this side-effect feature, but I do not plan on adding an admin setting.

An admin feature that will allow white-listing partial or full urls for absolute links instead of relative. Since WP doesn’t offer hooks for all of the applicable exports of content (ie RSS & certain Email conditions) I’m adding this feature to solve the root relative links in Email and RSS clients. Despite the actual bug existing in the respective RSS and Email clients that don’t support RFC3986 (or 2396, or 1808 which dates back to 1995) I’ll hack in a fix here… but Google, you seriously owe me a beer for what Google Reader does with urls.

Preserved HTML Markup:

So far there are a couple reports of various edge cases that fail to maintain consistency between tab switches. I plan on dealing with these in no particular order, but after I finished work on the above plugin.

Enhanced Menu Editor:

This one is actually open to change of ownership. If you are a developer who would like to extend the functionality of this plugin please contact me and I’ll gladly hand the project off to you.

Customized WYSIWYG Editor Widths

Totally a hacky plugin that I wrote in probably an hour or so that became surprisingly popular. There are no bug tickets on this project after a year of use, so I’m considering it sealed.

The future of my plugins

I’m at a point in my life where I have to reduce the number of projects I support. The main consequence of that decision is that I will no longer be enhancing my WordPress plugins with new features. I’ll continue to support the existing features they were designed to solve. If content is mangled by WordPress I’ll do my best to fix it. If URL’s are rendered improperly with RRU, I’ll fix that. But my limited development efforts will be focused on ScrewPress, my own CMS platform designed with Node.js, and designed without all of the baggage that WordPress likes to lug around. It’s by no means a replacement for WordPress, and it’s not really a production ready system. But it won’t be my preferred blogging platform unless I can dedicate my free time to the project. And WordPress is just too much of a time suck for me to effectively manage both.

I’ll still be developing WordPress sites in the future because Springbox, my employer, has a good track record of implementing great websites and applications on the very popular platform. But with the recent WordCamp/ThemeForest debacle where I side wholely against WordPress and Matt Mullenweg for screwing over a large portion of its developer community. Along with my general disdain towards the quite stubborn core development team members - you know who you are - I think it’s best if I took a personal abstention from the WordPress platform.

WordPress.org

My plugin site on wordpress.org is where you can find most of the information about my plugins. I've written a couple that are must-haves for me, and hopefully they are for you too. In particular the Preserved Markup and Root Relative URL plugins are my favorites.

Support Requests

If you have a support problem or question please open a new topic in the support forum at wordpress.org for the particular plugin you are having a problem with. I'm generally responsive to requests, however my wife and I are expecting a baby girl in the next couple of weeks so there will definitely be a period of time where support requests are suspended.

Please include the following answers when making a support request to expedite the resolution:

  • What version of WordPress and my plugins are you using?
  • Are you on Linux or Windows?
  • What browser do you use, and have you tried other browsers?
  • Please give as much detail about the problem you are experiencing as possible.

Support Remuneration (PayPal does not like the word Donations)

Many have asked about how to send me money, and while I'm hesitant to take money for just the plugins I do appreciate any money you'd like to send for supporting their use. I'll leave it up to you to decide, there are no expectations on my end.

Support
Message

Opinion Articles I'm Writing With Respect To WordPress

Older Versions Of My Plugins

I'm going to release previous versions of my plugin here on this domain when I get them bundled up. There has been one situation so far where an upgrade went awry for some and they needed a previous version. @dreamdancerdesign, a user in the forumns was kind enough to post a link, but that shouldn't be necessary (ahem wp core developers.)

Preserved HTML Markup
Root Relative Urls

My other plugins haven't changed enough to warrant archive versions here. But there are a couple issues I need to update in each so when I do I'll publish past versions here.

Development Requests

I'm not a huge fan of WordPress from an ideal platform perspective, but they do a lot of things correctly and it fits well into the industry I work in. I fix whatever drives me nuts or proves to be deficient when handing a project off to a customer. I've also highly customized the multi-site platform for Springbox, my employer, so I'm pretty fluent with most of the core codebase. If there is something structurally unsound with WordPress I'm very capable at correcting the problem.

Future Plugin Features

For my Preserved HTML Markup plugin I plan on adding the following features in the near future:

  • Add third party hooks so other plugins can preserve markup in custom editors
  • Allow for adjustable number of spaces (currently hard-coded to 4 spaces)
  • Allow multiline indenting and outdenting of code in HTML tab.
  • Allow PHP code blocks (maybe.)

For the Root Relative URL plugin:

  • Create an admin settings page to manage blacklisted urls that disable root relative content. This would resolve some minor issues with RSS content that I can't fix until WP Core team adds some missing hooks.
  • Add/Verify support for subdomain installs (this should be easy)
  • Creating a fix content button to remove absolute urls already created in content
  • Figure out a solution for Multi-Site.

Thanks for stopping by. Come back soon for more updates.