LightPress

Erik released a simple Plugin to generate a countdown for an upcoming event. All it does is output the days left, and all you have to do is to set the date in the admins' control panel. Get the file here: CountDown for LightPress

I would like to bring you today a new plugin for LightPress. It's about an new plugin for showing your twitter posts on your blog. It's very easy to install and fully configurable. This plugin has five parameters:

• twitter_id: Here you must to indicate your user id

• count: Number of posts that you wanna show it

• screen_name: Your screen name

• image: If you wanna show your profile image

• name: If you wanna show your name

Download | Twitter Plugin for LightPress
More info | AlfonsoJimenez.com (Spanish)

I have started to check-in some larger changes in svn to prepare for a serious 2.0 release. Most of these features we are already using successfully in our blog network weblogssl for a few weeks (+-30 blogs, almost 1.000.000 pageviews per day).

We are planning to release Lightpress 2.0 with the following features:

Openid comments:We already have this running in our branch, and we are using it already in some of our blogs. (f.e. www.genciencia.com). What is missing here is the adaptation of the templates in the trunk, and some generalization of settings which are now very specific for our setup.

Improved caching: Here we have have seperate caching of elements of the page. F.e. the sidebar is cached seperately from the body page, so that we can have very long expiries on the post pages, only occassionally decaching them on a new comment or trackback. This is also already in our branch and seems to be working correctly.

WP 2.1 compatibility
Various smaller things: performances fixes, better UTF8 support for tags, improvements to Comment Spam handling, SEO

I have started committing the openid stuff in svn, and I still have to find a way to bring over the caching without breaking too many already existing installations.

Wordpress 2.1 has finally been released. Here's a pick from the list of new features:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.

• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.

• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. (We'd have to check how that compares with lightpress-queries..)

• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.

• Pages can now be drafts, or private.

• Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.

• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

You can go grab the update at wordpress.org but beware: Lightpress won't work with Wordpress > 2.0.x yet! Mainly this is because of the changes to the posts-table and the link-categories.

The posts-table now has a column named "post_type" (which can take 'post' or 'page') and one named 'post_status' which is the usual 'publish', 'draft' or 'private'. The link-categories have been merged into the global categories-table (PLUS, old link-categories get a new id!) and there is a new table called 'link2cat' linking between the two tables.

I'm working on a patch (since my site is already working with wp2.1RC2 and lp2 nightly) and i hope it won't be long.

Our friend Omar has published Footnotes Plugin for LightPress on the LP support forum. It's a plugin that allows us to include footnotes on ours posts. More info at toomuchcookies.net

Installation

From LightPress root directory

1) Copy footnotes.php in /plugins
2) Copy footnotes.xml in /themes/XXXX/YYYY/plugins/ (XXXX and YYYY correspond to current theme and lang-codification respectively)
3) Activate the plugin from WP-Admin
4) To write a footnote, just add ((This is the footnote))

Features

1) You can change both the hook and the appearance of a footnote in the plugin-management
2) To change the look of the footnotes block you'd have to change the template 'footnote.xml'
3) You can even change the position of the footnotes block. For example to put the footnotes in the sidebar:

1. add {PLUGIN_FOOTNOTES} to the sidebar at the desired position

2. in the plugin management page, set 'templateready' to '1'

Download

Download | Footnotes Plugin for LightPress

I have just finished writing the first draft of the documentation for plugin authors. Leave here any comments or suggestions for improvement.

Yesterday I committed the new Gallery plugin by Sergi March that supports embedding Gallery2 images in Lightpress. The plugin is contained in the latest nightly. Thanks Sergi!

Those of you waiting for a stable 2.0 release can go ahead and download the nightly archive, as the only thing I expect to change before 2.0 is the installation instructions, as the fine folks at WeblogsSL have helped spot and fix quite a few bugs, and the WP2.x compatible code now seems stabler than previous versions.

In the latest nightly build, together with lots of fixes and improvements. Getting ready for a 2.0 release.

Work on WP 2.0 compatibility is mostly completed, and has been already merged to the trunk. You can now test Lightpress with WP 2.x using one of our nightly tarballs.

I have also made substantial changes to the administration interface, simplified the installation process, and made use of some of the WP 2.0 changes to the DB layout to further improve our rendering speed.

New plugins you get in the nightly tarballs:

AltTemplate

used to change one of the default templates in specific contexts, eg change the sidebar when viewing a post details page

ContactForm

add a contact form wherever you might need it (by Iñaki Ecenarro)

PostNavigation

show links to the following/preceding post in the post detail page, like MT (by Iñaki Ecenarro)

PostAdRecursion

show different template snippets every n posts in index pages

The most important change in this release is the new formatting function used for post and comments, that adds full XHTML support to Lightpress, as you can see on my Italian blog. You can read more about the evolution of this function in this thread on the forum. Thanks to Shadow Seraph for pointing this out.

This release fixes the few remaining reference warnings (remember to disable error display on production sites), and adds the new CommentsList plugin to list the latest comments.

Download: from our downloads page