xScape 1.4.3 features new set of icons for ShareThis module, and also new widget. Facebook module is expanded with LikeBox widget allowing customization of page to like, and all settings supported by Facebook widget control. Rest of the themes will be updated in the next couple of days.

lightScape theme had some styling issues, problems with ad in the header and problems with displaying widgets with the front page layout template.

To see themes and framework in action, visit the WordPressMU powered demo website and get your own blog to see who the framework back-end works:

Demo Site:
http://xscape.info/
lightScape:
http://xscape.info/lightscape/
airScape:
http://xscape.info/airscape/

Front Page: Lights Style

Theme number 5 is now released. This is feature packed theme called lightScape, with 14 color styles, different footer configurations, features posts sliders, top header with another menu, adjustable content background transparency and much more.

Dev4Press website will be soon redesigned and will use variation of this theme with custom styling.

You can see full long list of features and screenshots on theme pages, or try it for yourself on the xScape.info website. In the next 2 days you can expect videos explaining theme features and exploring the procedure of setting and using the theme. Until then, you can check out many existing videos for xScape framework or previously released themes.

To see the theme features and read more about it check the main theme page:

lightScape Info:
http://www.dev4press.com/themes/lightscape/

lightScape Screenshots:
http://www.dev4press.com/themes/lightscape/screenshots/

To see the theme and framework in action, visit the WordPressMU powered demo website and get your own blog to see who the framework back-end works:

Demo Site:
http://xscape.info/

lightScape:
http://xscape.info/lightscape/

Plugin will, basically, allow you to add Amazon products to your WordPress powered website. Here is a list of features that will be part of the first beta version:

• Search for Amazon products by keyword or by ASIN code and add them to database.
• Attach product to a post (post, page or any custom post types).
• Update products data periodically to get latest prices, info updates.
• Data classes for each product group supported by Amazon.
• Integration functions to display products in the theme templates.

Major problem with Amazon integration is the fact that they have many product groups, and each one has own set of attributes that are subject to constant changes, making it very hard to universally use taxonomies. But, database tables used for products will be flexible, and with wide selection of functions to perform all kinds of operations, we will try to make use of Amazon products as easy as possible.

If you have any suggestions on features for this plugin, please leave a comment. Beta versions of the plugin will be available for testing to all users with Dev4Press Plugins Bundle licenses. It will be available for testing through xScape.info also.

DropDown Examples

Each element in the dropdown now has classes added (LI tags are used). With this you can style individually each element. Also, options is added to expand these classes (it’s on by default), adding number item classes, odd/even classes and first/last classes.

Default styling is improved, and more default styles will come with next versions.

Also, examples page is different showing jQuery code used to display each example, and number of examples will also grow with each new version.

Homepage:
http://www.dev4press.com/jquery/jgd-dropdown/
Examples:
http://www.dev4press.com/jgd/dropdown/

Media Button

On all images controls in all xScape panels, you will see a new icon (image on the right) with folder on it. This will open well known media manager and you can use it to add images, upload images or use existing images from manager. This can be used for post specific images also. This will simplify use of images and allow you to use existing images without reuploading.

Avatar is global setting. Once you upload it and activate it, it will automatically override WP avatar settings. This will be used as default avatar for users that don’t have own Gravatar set. New xScape has some bugs fixed and improved Blueprint support for some very interesting things used in lightScape theme.

Test all themes, including the beta version of upcoming lightScape, and try them with a free test drive, for both front end and back end:

Demo Loader: http://xscape.info/load/
Demo Home: http://xscape.info/

From now on, all themes will go through Beta phase before theme is released here. This will help to better test the theme and make it more stable. Also, we can use this period to make new default styles, so you can also suggest color palettes or enhancements.

lightScape Beta features new version of xScape and several new features: Use of WP media dialog to upload or use images from media library, Upload and use default avatar, global settings and improvements to Blueprint support and implementation. Also, several bugs are fixed, mostly with Menu Designer.

xScape.info Demo Website:
http://xscape.info/
lightScape Beta Demo:
http://xscape.info/load/?theme=lightscape

Also, this theme will replace current one on Dev4Press. Dev4Press version of the theme will not be available for public, and the mod will include different color styles, overrides for front page and some other elements.

If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.

lightScape Front Page

jGD DropDown

This plugin is made out of necessity because I couldn’t find any plugin that was usable for what I needed. Plugin is based on the tutorials article written by Janko at Warp Speed. Plugin is easy to style, and more default styles will be added in future versions.

Also, there are some plans for the future release:

• select multiple items
• support for jQueryUI
• more styling options
• AJAX support
• linked dropdown lists

I have no idea when all that will be done, it’s not really my priority, but I use this control in many projects, so it will grow and more features will be added. For now, try it out, use it in your projects and report any problems or leave suggestions.

Homepage:
http://www.dev4press.com/jquery/jgd-dropdown/
Examples:
http://www.dev4press.com/jgd/dropdown/

Real Capital P filter uses regular expression to find and later replace all the instances of ‘WordPress’ eligible for replacement. This will include all occurrences of the ‘WordPress’ regardless of case, but will not match it if it appears in the links such as HREF or SRC attributes for A, IMG, SCRIPT or LINK tags. If you have suggestions on what else should be excluded from filtering, please leave a suggestion and I will update and improve the function.

Function is available in both Lite and Pro versions, and it works with any WordPress version supported by the plugin. Removal of Matt’s filter is still available, and both these are part of the Content tab on the plugins Settings panel.

Please report any problems you might have with the new version(s).

Lowercase p, dangit!:
http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/07/08/lowercase-p-dangit
Fun with the Capital P:
http://capitalp.org/

xScape 1.4.2 will have several new features:

• Use of WordPress media manager. With this you can use images you might have in media manager already. This will work for all images used by theme.
• Upload of Gravatar default image to replace default images in WordPress.

lightScape detail

As for lightScape, image on the right shows a detail from one of the current two color styles. This one is called Autumn. You can see transparent content area (this will be used for some styles, not all), and there are two menus. Top header area for now can have menu and search box, and I plan to add rss feeds, twitter and similar links there.

There will be slider on the page, and layout supports one sidebar and one widgets footer area.

So, very soon, all current themes will get new framework, and demo of lightScape goes on xScape by the end of the week.

Without going too deep into the problem with filter of capital P, check the link at the bottom of this post. But, Matt wrote a very simple filter (without anyone approving it or any discussion in community) that searches for ‘Wordpress’ in the text and replaces it with ‘WordPress’. And since search/replace is not content aware at all, this will replace in text but also in URL’s and that will break URL in most cases (images especially). Filter removal option is on plugins Settings panel, on Administration tab.

Pro version got new options for setting CHMOD default values, function to determine if the user is online (uses plugins tracking data of users latest activity) and features several new registration filtering rules. Also, some problems with domain filtering is fixed as well as some styling issues on plugin panesl.

Please report any problems you might have with the new version(s).

Lowercase p, dangit!:
http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/07/08/lowercase-p-dangit

Name for taxonomy and custom post type has messages explaining the required format for a name. I have changed this and it’s now the same message only in bold red letters. Plugin will also attempt to clean the name when saving: remove illegal characters and make the name lower case.

If you have any more problems, please report them in the forum or in comments.

GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools:
http://dv4p.com/gdtt

Articles panel is expanded with different filter for custom post types. Some of integration functions are improved. Readme file is updated with more FAQ entries. Database Tools panel got one more tool you need to be very, very careful about because it will remove all stored rating data from database.

TinyMCE button and plugin are fixed to support taxonomies changes in WP 3.0 and custom post types. Same goes for Builder panel, and for the widgets that had problems with grouping by taxonomies. Few more problems with the meta boxes integration on post edit page are also fixed.

If you find anymore bugs, please report them via comments or in the forums.

GD Star Rating: http://www.gdstarrating.com/

To check the results from first part of the benchmark, go the this post. There you have test setup and results for memory usage, page generation speed and executed SQL queries. Second part of the admin test is in this post.

Tests results presented here are average values from 20 measurements. Also, only active plugin in all tests was GD Press Tools Pro. Adding more plugins have no effect on the overall difference in terms of memory use or execution time. Showing more tests that have the same result in the end is not needed.

Test 6: PHP Used memory on site

Similar to the admin side, WP 3.0 uses more memory on the site side. Difference is about 1.6MB, and it’s not much in this normal setup with no plugins active (expect for GD Press Tools).

Used Memory: Again WP 3.0 uses more memory as expected

Adding plugins to the mix will have as a result more or less the same difference in used memory, or slight increase to 2MB of more memory. But even with more than 20 plugins on site side WP will still use much less memory than admin side. Still, 32MB for 20 or more plugins is not enough.

Also, used memory with Kubrick and 2010 themes in WP 3.0 is almost the same, with new theme needed a bit more memory, considering new features added in it, this difference is not important.

Test 7: SQL queries executed on site

Code optimizations in WP 3.0 were beneficial on site, and WP 3.0 will run less SQL queries for same result from WP 2.9.2. This is only couple of queries, but from server point of view, very important.

SQL Queries: Once again WP 3.0 is better than WP 2.9.2

With less queries, SQL execution time is lower, but that didn’t help WP 3.0 in the next test, with overall time needed to make a page increased.

Test 8: Page rendering server side on site

With both themes WP 3.0 is slower than WP 2.9.2 by 10-15%, in all the tests. This difference is just about the same as on the admin side. And it’s to be expected, more code is added to each execution (more memory is needed), and PHP needs more time to run all that.

Server side execution: WP 3.0 is slower than WP 2.9.2

Due to some added features new Twenty Ten themes is slower than Kubirck. Surprising result is on the single post page where WP 3.0 with Twenty Ten was faster than with Kubrick. Getting post data seams to be optimized better in WP 3.0 and that shows here.

More tests: Client Side?

Results for both WP versions would be the same (with the difference in JavaScript, since they use different versions of jQuery). So, these tests will not show much here, results are almost 100% the same.

Conclusion

Progress has it’s price. And for WordPress 3.0 that is more resources needed and slower execution. With todays available servers and faster Internet, this is not a big factor, considering what you will get after you upgrade to WP 3.0. So, not to point only negative side of the benchmark, I will write conclusive article in the next few days that will put this values in better context and real evolution of WordPress in it’s current release.

Bottom line: upgrade to WordPress 3.0 as soon as possible (as soon as you are sure that all plugins you use are compatible).

Favorite Actions

Only few days after major 2.0 release, GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools gets another Pro version that includes few fixes (widgets) and some very interesting new features. Lite version is also updated and cloud widget bug is now fixed, and few things updated.

Right Now

As you can see on the image on the right, now each custom post type can be added to the Favorite Actions menu in the header, and as displayed on the image on the left, it can be added to dashboard widget called Right Now showing number of items for that post type and a link to edit page as it is done for my custom post type called Document.

This can be done with any custom post type, and these are only the first to so called Special Features that plugin implements. To set them, edit the custom post type, and you will see a new Settings elements called Special. It’s a drop down allowing you to select special features you want to use for that post type.

Special Features

More features will be added with next versions, and if you have suggestions for them, please leave a comment. And, special features are only available in Pro version of the plugin.

Other changes in this version include fixed cloud widget and removed integration with Google XML Sitemap plugin for taxonomies, because that plugin supports taxonomies for quite some time now.

GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools:
http://dv4p.com/gdtt

Expanded taxonomy meta box

New version of GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools is finally ready. Sorry for a delay, but I needed some time to test new features and also decide what to do about one more feature previously announced. Lite version is also released with some minor changes.

As you can see on the image on the right, there are two new elements for Post Tags and all other non hierarchical taxonomies you might use. Clear ALL is available for some time now, and the other is brand new Yahoo Suggest. It will take post content and submit that to Yahoo, and will get back tags from the content. You can add all tags, or refresh it, or click on individual tags to add some of them.

Other new feature is on the taxonomies and custom posts panels. New option is added to display function that will create taxonomy or custom post type even if you don’t use the plugin.

Another planned feature was new widget with all taxonomies, but that’s been moved to another version, because I wasn’t satisfied how it turned out. After it gets reworked, it will be included, most likely in 2.1.

If you notice any problems with new features, report it in the forum or leave a comment.

GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools:
http://dv4p.com/gdtt

As I announced previously, new themes are in development, and first one will be lightScape, and I will post few screenshots this week, and theme will be out by the end of next week.

Test all themes and try them with a free test drive, for both front end and back end:

Demo Loader: http://xscape.info/load/
Demo Home: http://xscape.info/

Basically, most of the BuddyPress themes you can find on the Internet are child themes of the default BuddyPress theme. These themes add own images and own styling, with maybe changing footer message, and that’s it. You still have the same default theme that you get with BuddyPress with tweaked colors and images. Making these child themes is easy and doesn’t require modifying any of the actual templates/php files. But, creating theme is more than just changing colors, and doing so with WordPress is far from easy, or even user friendly.

But, making new theme that will have unique look is very, very complicated. To make things worse, there are no tutorials, no documentation (well, there is some documentation, but nothing really useful for making full theme) and the only thing you can do is to analyze the default theme and experiment. Main problem with this is the complexity of the BP theme, that goes way beyond normal WP theme. Default BP theme has 62 PHP files (default WP theme has 18 PHP files), and getting clear picture on what happens where, how templates are used or loaded.

To be honest, BP 1.2 theme code and organization is better than previous major versions, but it’s still way to complicated. Also, a full theme made from scratch for BP 1.2.x may not even work with BP 1.3 or BP 1.4. And that’s just unacceptable for a system that should work for years to come and have relatively easy maintenance cycle. So, you invest a lot of time to make full theme, and after few months when new BP is released, that theme is not working. That’s just not something that developers and designers want to hear. Even minor changes in WordPress major versions are usually subject to debates and how that will affect existing plugins and themes, I guess that BuddyPress is still not that big for their developers to take into account that other users expect some continuity in the code base.

No matter how good BuddyPress is and how important for WordPress is, it’s still not mature enough to ensure some sort of development security for developers that want to invest time to make plugins or themes that will work with BP. Until the BP code base becomes stable enough for something like that, we are not going to see many original themes that support BuddyPress.

So, back to xScape. I still plan to try to make a theme that will be compatible with BuddyPress. But, I am not going to make separate themes for WP and separate for BP, that must be a single theme that will work with or without BP installed. I am not sure when such theme will happen, but I started some work on it already.

Theme mentioned before called newsScape is a bit delayed, and I expect that it will be completed by the end of July. But, in the first week of July, a brand new theme is coming and will be called lightScape. I will post few teaser shots from this theme design next week, but the theme will feature slider control, top menu/search area, main menu in the header, one sidebar and footer widgets area. Also, there will be 2 configurations and designs for footer. In some ways this new theme reminds of the theme currently used on Dev4Press (it’s The Station from WooThemes). And once completed, it will replace this theme and full website will be redesigned. As usual, theme will have at least 10 color styles, and as a special feature I will try to make adjustable typography (fonts and sizes) that makes sense. This is usually difficult to achive because many design elements depend on this settings. But, I will try to do it.

GD Custom Posts and Taxonomies 2.0 will be released in a less then a week with several new features and improvements including better integration with post editor. GD Press Tools will get one or two maintenance releases for both Pro and Lite versions and hopefully 3.8 during July will bring more new tools.

So, stay tuned for more new releases on Dev4Press and busy development during first summer month of July.

New version features new translations, code cleanup and few improvements in base widget class. Plugin is fully compatible with latest WordPress 3.0.

GD LinkedIn Badge: http://www.dev4press.com/plugins/gd-linkedin-badge/

Basic license included only Pro version of the plugin, and no support. All plugins had basic license, and starting today, this license is no longer available. All products will be available only as subscription based will monthly or yearly payment methods. This ensures that all who purchase any of the products get full support for it, not only plugin. Because of that, some of the info on support, faq and individual plugin pages are changed and updated to new licensing model that only has membership/subscription based licensing.

Still, plugins and themes are all released under GPL and that’s not changed and will not change in the future. For all our products you are not paying for the plugin or theme only, you are paying for support, upgrades and continued development and improvement of all products and full compatibility with latest versions of WordPress.

Yearly based membership prices are now lower for all plugins and themes. Prices are lower on average by 15%.

To check the results from first part of the benchmark, go the this post. There you have test setup and results for memory usage, page generation speed and executed SQL queries.

Test 4: Generated Page Size and JavaScript

This test will show how the big pages are, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images send to the browser. There is a slight increase in the data send, but this not a big deal, considering the results from Test 5 you can see later. More JavaScript shows that interaction is better, and more elements are now using AJAX or animate for better user experience.

Generate Page Size: WP 3.0 makes slightly larger pages

Page JavaScript: WordPress 3.0 adds slightly more JS

This is not very important test, because standard Internet connections today are broadband everywhere, and that can handle a bit bigger pages. But, it’s a good idea to keep the track of everything and don’t allow to grow out of control.

Test 5: Client Side Execution

Well, new jQuery and better JavaScript code payed of and the WordPress 3.0 executes faster now. But, this is highly dependent on the browser and there are big differences in speed. My measurements are done with Firefox 3.6.3, and here is the chart:

Clientside Page Execution: WordPress 3.0 is faster

WP 2.9.2 is a bit faster on post edit panel, but in WP 3.0 there is much more going on there, more AJAX, so this is not a big surprise. In all other cases WP 3.0 is faster. But, if you want it fast that don’t use Firefox! And don’t use MS Internet Explorer. Opera 10.5/10.6 is 3-4 times faster than Firefox, and in Opera a page renders usually under 3 seconds. Google Chrome 4 is 2 times faster than Firefox, and Chrome 5/6 is 4 times faster. Safari 4/5 is 2 times faster than Firefox. Internet Explorer (even IE8) in some cases can take 20 seconds to render some pages in WordPress.

For administration of all my WP websites I use Opera, and I always get frustrated when I have to use Firefox because it slows me down, since I am so used to Opera and speed it provides. Browsers race in improved JS speed is a good thing, and with every new version Opera, Chrome and Safari keep getting faster. I don’t know what’s wrong with Mozilla, but Firefox right now is very slow compared to these 3 browsers, and I hope that Mozilla will make some important changes and get back in the speed game with Firefox 4 (for 3.7 is already too late, and it’s not faster than 3.6).

Conclusion

So, WordPress 3.0 is faster now and gives much better user experience, and more things are changed and improved to provide better administration features. AJAX is used much more, and there are more interactive elements all over. Despite some problems with memory usage and other things I talked about in previous part of this benchmark, there is no doubt that WordPress 3.0 is the best and most important release of this platform in last 2 years.

URL scanner is added to prevent SQL code injection or too long URL that can also be indication of some sort of injection attack. Global Settings panel that was previously part of multi site installations, now are available in all installations to avoid too many options on main Settings panel. You can also add additional fields for contact to users profiles, and this is also global setting.

Number of things are fixed including problem with loading not existing CSS file, problem with adding commend ID column, and some minor validation problems.

GD Press Tools: http://dv4p.com/gdpt

Most issues so far were caused by the lack of memory for PHP causing not only upgrade to fail, but some memory hungry pages also. Also, compatibility of many old plugins caused upgraded websites to break, pointing to a big problem with most plugins that are not in development anymore but still widely in use and preventing many websites owners to move to new and better WordPress.

Test setup

Tests are done using fresh installations of WP 2.9.2 and WP 3.0. Only one plugin was used, and that is GD Press Tools Pro 3.7 that is used to perform some of the measurements for the benchmark. At the end I did some testing using 10 plugins. My test server uses Apache 2.2.11, PHP 5.2.9 and mySQL 5.1.37. I have tested following (and most important) admin pages: Dashboard, Posts, Post Edit and Comments.

This first part will focus on WordPress administration because most of the issues are there, and this time PHP used memory, page loading and number of executed SQL queries.

Test 1: PHP Used Memory

WP 3.0 uses more memory than WP 2.9.2. On all pages WP 3.0 uses 2MB more, and on some it can use between 3-4 MB more than in WP 2.9.2. This difference is the same regardless the number of plugins active.

Used Memory: WP 3.0 uses 2MB more than WP 2.9.2

Activating 10 plugins, memory rises by 8MB. On this website that has 20 plugins active, WP uses 41MB on average. Most WordPress websites use 15 or more plugins, and that means that standard setups with 32MB for PHP are not enough to run WordPress. This is very important requirement for WordPress, and yet it’s not stated anywhere on official website, and most users will find out about this the hard way and unprepared. WordPress.org MUST state somewhere how much memory you will need under different setups, because right now WordPress 3.0 can’t be run at all on default PHP installation with minimal 16MB.

Another memory issue is upgrade from 2.9.2 to 3.0. If you have more than 11-13 plugins active and only 32MB and you are on host that prevents changing of PHP memory, automatic upgrade will surely fail. I tested 2 of my websites locally with memory limited to 32MB, upgrade failed in every case. Also, if you upgrade your website with all plugins disabled first, you need at least 30MB (!) for PHP for auto upgrade. So, realistic minimal PHP memory requirement for WordPress is 32MB. With many plugins active, you need at least 48MB or 64MB for PHP. And this all will make a lot of problems to all users on shared hosting.

Test 2: Number of SQL queries

This is very much improved in WordPress 3.0, and on average WP 3.0 executes less queries and that’s good because your mySQL server can run with more requests in the same time. Both number of queries and time needed for all of them is faster in WP 3.0.

SQL Queries: WP 3.0 is better than WP 2.9.2

This points to many optimizations behind the scenes, and new WordPress will have less impact to mySQL server performance than previous versions including WP 2.7, WP 2.8 and WP 2.9.

Test 3: Page Loading, server side

Some time is gained by lower mySQL execution time, but it’s lost on the PHP side, so overall loading time is a bit slower than before. Difference goes up to 10%, but in some cases loading time is the same. Number is average of 10 measurements.

Server side execution: WP 3.0 is a bit slower than WP 2.9.2

Conclusion

This is the first part of these tests. Second one is coming tomorrow, and the third will be in a couple of days. These tests show you measured facts about new WordPress, but you mus be aware of all the changes in new WordPress and everything added, because all that comes with the prices: performance. You can’t add tons of features and expect nothing to change. But, I think that big problem is that existing WordPress users were not prepared to that fact and many of them blame WordPress developers for the problems they had with upgrading to WP 3.0.

Over the last 2 years, WordPress needs more resources with every new version, but there is nothing about that on official WordPress website, and until you experience the problem first hand, you have no idea that WordPress needs more and more resources to run. And all that is just bad work from everyone working on WordPress.org that needed to prepare users for the new release and what they can expect. Same mistake with every release, and that’s not good.

Dev4Press compatibility

First, all our plugins and all themes are fully compatible with new WordPress. There will be minor updates over the next few days if the errors are found in any of them, so please, report any problems if you find them.

Upgrading

I have auto updated most of my WordPress driven websites to WP 3.0, without any problems. But this is only on systems with PHP memory limit set higher than 32MB. I tried two older blogs running with 32MB running WP 2.8, and on both upgrade failed due to lack of memory caused by average number of plugins these websites were using. I think that many users will have to perform manual upgrade if they run in the problems with the memory and auto upgrade.

Another problem is compatibility. All existing themes should be working fine, but with plugins there will be problems. Most plugins that use JavaScript to improve and modify WP will simply fail and cause many problems. I hope that plugin developers will fix the problems soon, because even number of popular plugins are affected by problems.

Big problem with WP 3.0, as it was with previous versions is that uses more memory. This is unavoidable, and 32MB is simply not enough to run website with WP if you plan to use 5-6 or more plugins. Compared with WordPress 2.9.2, this website memory usage grew by 20% when upgraded to WP 3.0. Similar is with my other websites. And with 20 plugins I use on this website, admin pages use from 42MB to 50MB depending on the page.

Features

I am not going to go into details about what this version added, the list is very long. You can check the full list on official website using links at the bottom. Bu,t most important addition are fully implemented custom post types, improved custom taxonomies, custom navigation and much, much more. I think that custom post types will prove to be the most important addition to WordPress added in the last 2 years to make WP even more competitive in the CMS market offering high degree of flexibility.

Merging with WordPressMU and changes that lead to new networks mode is also very important change. Installation of the multi site / network mode is not very complicated, and upgrading from WPMU goes smoothly.

Theme 2010

Well, I said it before and I will say it again: I don’t like the new default theme. It was the time for WordPress to get theme to replace good old Kubrick, but new theme is just not as good as I expected. But, I never run website with default theme anyway, so I don’t really care about that. But, for the overall image of WordPress, better theme was needed.

And in the end

There will be much more talk over the next few weeks, but right now this is hands down the best WordPress release in years. From all my testing in the past 4 months and the tests of the final WP 3.0, I can tell you that it’s very stable and reliable like no other major WordPress release I have tried since WP 2.3. I am sure that bugs will surface soon enough but that’s nothing new, important thing is that you can safely upgrade and benefit from new features. Also, make sure that plugins you use are up to date with WP 3.0 to avoid problems.

Finally, all the developers working on WordPress 3.0 deserve a big thanks from the whole WordPress community, because they did a great job on making this latest release. You can check out the list of all developers and contributors on the official WP website. I am honored to be mentioned among contributors even so I only reported several bugs and fixed one.

And to celebrate

To celebrate release of new WordPress I have decided to offer a 30% discount for all our plugins licenses. Discount coupon is WORDPRESS30. It has limited number of uses, so hurry up and use it for individual plugins or bundle pack.

Links:

WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” Release Post
WordPress 3.0 List of Features and Changes

Due to changes in order of initializing post types and taxonomies and creating rewrite rules, I had to change and improve flushing of rewrite rules after new post type or taxonomy is added. Some internal links are fixed (from plugins page). And, Pro version got new setting allowing for adding excerpt for pages.

Please report any problems with WordPress 3.0 and this plugin.

There are only few terms for making reviews:

• Your website must be at least 3 months active.
• Your website must be WordPress related (not exclusive).

If you have such website, please contact us using Contact Form (select Review in Feedback Type field). Include your website URL, and what plugin or theme you would like to review. And you will get:

• Pro version of plugin or theme you can use for review.
• Free licenses (5 or more) for giveaway you can organize for your website readers of the reviews plugin or theme.
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Also, you can sign up as affiliate and use provided banners for plugins and themes to promote our products and earn 20-25% commission for initial sale and all recurring payments.

So, if you are interested in reviewing plugins or themes, please contact us.

URL scanner is added to prevent SQL code injection or too long URL that can also be indication of some sort of injection attack. Global Settings panel that was previously part of multi site installations, now will be available in all installations to avoid too many options on main Settings panel.

So, test it and report any problems that need to be fixed before final release.

xScape roadmap is updated from time to time, and you can always use it as a reference to see what’s coming. I can’t guarantee the dates of releases, and that’s why plans are milestone based. Next milestone is 1.5.0 and at least 6-7 versions will be released until it’s reached. So, the features in the roadmap will be split in the releases leading to the milestone.

For the 1.5 milestone, current list of planned features is as follows:

• Gravatar: you can upload custom gravatar to use instead of default ones.
• Breadcrumbs and archives customizations. You can specify the format used to display what these heading blocks display.
• GD Press Tools Pro Maintenance Mode: themes can add templates for maintenance mode.
• GD Affiliate Center: custom locations to place banners into each theme.
• Improvements to templates dealing with custom taxonomies and custom post types.
• Login form drop down or widget like to be integrated on the each page.
• Conditional layouts control based on taxonomies.

As for the Lite version of the framework to be used in free themes, it’s not happening any time soon, so xScape will remain exclusively premium framework and all themes only premium. Once I get time to make lite version, some themes will get free versions, but I have no idea when that’s gonna happen.

This is not set in stone, and I am sure that many other things will be added also. If you have any suggestions, leave a comment.

New Registrations Panel

Both editions got more options for tweaking WordPress: remove logo, favorites drop down, help tab and turbo link.

Registrations panel in Pro edition is improved and now you can see more clearly what is banned. Any banned data is now shown in red. Options are more streamlined and colors are used for filtered rows. Many things about validation is improved and tweaked a bit to improve detection of spam registrations. So far, xScape.info is using anti-spam filters and right now I have no spam registrations any more.

Panels in Pro version are updated, and more changes are introduced for multi site installations. All update related settings are now global in multi site environment only for network administrator. More changes for better multi site compatibility will be added in future versions.

If you notice any problems with registrations and validity checks, please report it so I can improve procedures further.

airScape

Theme has 6 preset color schemes, with more to come in the next versions, but you can set all colors from control panel and make your own unique look. Theme has support for two sidebars that can be resized and moved left or right or completely disabled depending on the template needs.

To see the theme features and read more about it check the main theme page:

airScape Info:
http://www.dev4press.com/themes/airscape/

airScape Screenshots:
http://www.dev4press.com/themes/airscape/screenshots/

To see the theme and framework in action, visit the WordPressMU powered demo website and get your own blog to see who the framework back-end works:

Demo Site:
http://xscape.info/

airScape:
http://xscape.info/airscape/

Google Buzz button is added to the buttons you can add to your posts. Layouts manager has a new Tools tab, and one tool for now for setting mirror template to all templates. Master template is now improved and allow using of layout as well as settings in both custom and mirror modes. There will be more changes here in next 1.4.1 release. There are also many improvements in the theme and blueprint classes allowing for more flexibility in working with page templates.

New theme airScape is completed, and will be released tonight. Demo is already live on xScape.info using latest version of the code.

Test all themes and try them with a free test drive, for both front end and back end:

airScape Demo: http://xscape.info/load/?theme=airscape
Demo Loader: http://xscape.info/load/
Demo Home: http://xscape.info/

Registration Panel

As you can see, panel has filter on top where you can set validity and banning filter. Grid supports paging (20 records per page) and shows filtered results. Options allow you to ban any of the parameters for any of the records.

Also, domain is now added as a parameter for registration. This is domain used in the email. Few more regular expressions are added for email and name filtering.

Next version will add bulk controls bellow the grid, email of the daily digest of registrations and few more things. If you have any suggestion to improve spam filters, leave the comment.

There were several bugs with custom taxonomies in both use in menus and templates. Several layout manager bugs are also fixed.

Test all themes and try them with a free test drive, for both front end and back end:

Demo Loader: http://xscape.info/load/
Demo Home: http://xscape.info/

So, I spent my whole weekend on adding spam fighting power to GD Press Tools. I begun testing new version of the plugin 2 days ago, and I have added more filters and I made many tweaks and changes. Before I installed the new version of the plugin xScape.info website got 10-15 spam blogs each day, and on the weekends that number is even higher. But, ever since 3.6 version of plugin was uploaded, plugin prevented 95% of all spam registration requests. None of other legitimate registrations was prevented. And so far, plugin has only several filters added. Over time, more will be added to cover as much spam requests as possible.

Spam fighting options

So, what GD Press Tools 3.6 Pro does? New registrations settings tab is added. If you use WordPress MultiSite installations, this panel will be among global settings only for network administrators, if not it will be on normal settings panel. Previously available restriction username settings (keywords and minimal and maximal username length) are moved to this panel. Auto filter, auto banning and log options are added. Filter uses regular expressions to match spam usernames, emails and user agents on user/blog registrations pages. If matched, IP, username or email can be automatically blocked. IP can even be used to prevent access not only to registration/login page, but to whole website.

Next versions will get panel to manage registrations, banned IP’s and other data and to fine tune what you need to do to minimize spam on your website. There is no way to have 100% success in spam fighting, but filtering most of it without much work is something we surely need. With recently added user prune and more security related features to be added, GD Press Tools Pro is an essential plugin for any blog. I will publish a video tutorial explaining implications of using these features in the next day or two.

GD Press Tools Pro, no longer works with WordPress 2.7, as it was announced last week, you need at least WordPress 2.8. There are many more changes to settings panel, many tweaks and changes all over.

Custom Taxonomies now have number of visibility options allowing to control even the availability of taxonomy in the navigation menus designer. Custom post types is expanded with several new options for export and search features. And, few minor bugs are fixed and few other things updated for full compliance with latest build of WP 3.0.

Pro version 2.0 is in works and new widget will be added to it, with few more interesting features. It will be available in about 2 weeks, just after the release of final WordPress 3.0.

You can add one or more testimonials once you are logged in, from your account section. There is a new page there, called testimonials. There you will see simple form, with subject (not required) and content. Content is limited to 512 characters. When your testimonial is displayed on the website it will contain your gravatar, URL to your website and URL to your Twitter account. So, you need to fill in these to on the profile page, add testimonial and you are set. Displaying testimonials will benefit you because it will generate links back to your website, and potentially increase your traffic. Testimonials will be displayed on all our WordPress releated websites, not just this one.

Next week, Showcase will be active and you will be able to submit your websites using our products for the Showcase page.

You can get basic license for some plugins or single theme license, and both are single payments only, with no recurring payments ever. This is not changed. But, recurring membership based payments required a recurring payments every 2 or 3 months, depending on the product. And with each payment you pay not only for the payment, but you pay your bank for making the transfer. This transfer fee is not high, but if you have several such payments due each month, than those fees can be substantial.

So, if you decide to buy any of our products, you now have a new payment model that is recurring once a year. After you purchase product and pay initial price, you don’t need to pay anything for a year. And from than, payments are recurring yearly. Not only that, but if you calculate prices to compare monthly and yearly payments, you will see that after a first year, you payed less using yearly model. Let’s take xScape Themes Club Developer Membership. With monthly model, initial price is  130,00 Euro with 30,00 Euro recurring every 2 months. For a first year, you pay total 310,00 Euro (initial + 6 recurring payments). With yearly model initial payment is 270 Euro, and that covers the full year, so you save 40 Euros after one year. Yearly recurring payment is 150,00 Euro, and that is 30, 00 Euro less than if you use monthly model. With new model, depending on the product, each year you same 10-15%. Add to that bank fees and you see how much cheaper this new model is.

All products have similarly smaller prices for yearly model, and everything included is the same regardless of what you choose as payment. One of the reasons for lower price is that we also pay for processing of each payment we receive, so with less payments we have less expenses, and in term you get to pay less.

If you notice any problem with new payment process, please contact us to sort it out. If you have any suggestion on improving payments further, please leave a comment.

There are days that I get over 200 spam blogs registered over at xScape demo website. And I get the IP used for registration, and I add it to .HTACCESS file. And than I need to removed all those blogs. And that takes time, and always it’s very frustrating. And to be honest, the only method that have some effect is banning IP’s. But, there is nothing to prevent these spam bots to use another IP.

I searched, and I searched, and there is not a single plugin that offers any kind of protection from this. And everybody seems to be fine with that. Website administrators are patiently block IP’s, delete spam and nothing is changed. Well, I am not fine with that. So, last night I started work on a new feature for GD Press Tools Pro that will fight spam registrations. At this point it’s all done, and it works with both regular websites running WP and multi sites. There are several methods plugin implements right now, and they will be expanded over time:

• Prevent using keywords in the username (old feature)
• Limit length of username with minimum and maximum length value (old feature)
• Perform regular expression filtering of username and email. If they fail with at least one expression, they are considered invalid.
• Log registration requests into DB, and mark them with filter that they failed.
• Auto ban IP, email or username automatically if they fail filter tests.
• Redirect visits to whole website or wp-login.php/wp-signup.php based on the banned IP.

Starting tonight I will test the plugin on xScape.info and make sure that everything works before rolling out GD Press Tools 3.6 Pro next week. This will be another Pro exclusive feature and over time will be expanded with more options and more filter tests. If you have suggestion what else can be included, please leave a comment or send me an email. I will be happy to improve this as much as possible and help all plugin users by saving them some time and a lot of frustration from cleaning the website from spam registrations. And with increasing number of WPMU and WP 3.0 Multisites, I am sure that spam problem will only increase. And with already implemented prune users feature GD Press Tools is very powerful tool that will make your blog clean and secure.

So stay tuned, new GD Press Tools will get his spam fighting powers soon.

I must say that I am impressed with the the upgrade in WP 3.0. xScape demo website has some 20 blogs right now, but I guess that even with large WPMU website everything should be fine. I also posted a tutorial on the upgrade procedure and exactly what I did during the xScape upgrade. You can check it out:

Migrate from WPMU 2.9.2 to WP 3.0 MultiSite

New xScape.info now works faster than before, uses less memory and benefits from all new features in WP 3.0. If you have WPMU websites I recommend that you try upgrading to new WP.

To try xScape themes and Dev4Press plugins go to xScape and get your own 48 hours free blog:

xScape Demo

With function use bug, there was a problem with terms links on the taxonomies page, and that is fixed also. I have added flush of rewrite rules for taxonomies also as it was added for post types earlier. List widget now uses modified version of WP default list function that will allow great flexibility to add more options to this widget later.

New icons are added to this release, again work of our designer Vladan Vasic.

New Icon

Brand new GD Press Tools 3.5 Pro has just been released and this version brings another major tool allowing you to remove inactive users. There are more new things in this version, including updated plugin icon, improvements to database tools and more.

New panel is called Prune Users and includes filter block that will display users matching the filter with basic data to review and option to delete them.

Prune Users Panel

In the next versions of the plugin, there will be more options for filtering and deletion. So, if you get a bunch of registrations and accounts that never get used, this is the easy way to get rid of them.

Also, new option is added for WP 2.9 and newer for setting automatic deletion of trashed items. Database backup tab now displays estimate for compressed backup size. And as always, some minor problems are fixed. For WP 3.0 new integration option is added, to display ID column for comments. More comments columns will follow.

Code optimization started with this version, and part of the code is moved from main class to admin class that will be loaded only for admin side, and save memory on blog side because it will not be loaded there.

Thanks to Vladan Vasic, designer behind eScape and photoScape themes, plugin now has new icon. And the Dev4Press website will be updated with his icons and other elements this and next week.

So, check and test the new version and please report any problems you find. In the next month you can expect maintenance versions, but main work on GD Press Tools 4.0Pro has started.

Important: This is the last version of GD Press Tools to support WordPress 2.7. With increasing difficulties to track new functions and functionalities in last few versions of WP, new major GD Press Tools will support 2.8 and higher versions of WordPress.

Shared templates through framework are fixed and improved. Problems with archive heading are fixed. Also, faceBook module has one setting that can cause validation to fail, so there is a new message to warn you about that.

Test all themes and try them with a free test drive, for both front end and back end:

Demo Loader: http://xscape.info/load/
Demo Home: http://xscape.info/

For drop down to work with all taxonomies, an existing function for dropdown for categories was not too flexible, so I added a new function that improves on the original one. Main widget class is also improved to handle some of the new options. And, both Pro and Lite got the same updates.

Next week WordPress 3.0 RC1 will be released, and in about the same time this plugin will get major releases. Pro version 2.0, and Lite version 1.2 will have few more custom post options, various small improvements and code cleanup. But, Pro version will get another widget allowing display of drop down boxes for all taxonomies in a single widget as an ultimate taxonomies navigation for websites that use many taxonomies.

Few small bugs are also fixed. In the next few days there will be more changes added. First, I will add more custom post features added in latest builds of WP 3.0. Next, improvements to widgets will follow. In about same time when WordPress 3.0 is finally released, you will get GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools 2.0 Pro and 1.2 Lite.

Website is update and uses latest nightly build of WordPress 3.0. Most likely, this is the last WP 3.0 build that we will update until the final version is released.

Showcase is almost ready. In your user account section of pages you will be able to use Showcase page to submit your website that uses any of our themes. They will be included in the public Showcase page after the review. Terms for submitting will be included with the the submit form. Testimonials page will be added to account pages, and you can leave your testimonial about our plugins or themes and about support on Dev4Press.

If you notice any errors, or problems with the website, please use contact form or leave a comment.

List of available translations is within your account pages, and can be accessed here. For each POT file there will be list of added translations. There is a page with instructions where everything is explained: upload instructions, naming the files… List of WordPress supported locale codes is here. Once you get POT file you want to translate, you can upload translation using upload form. All these can be accessed only when you are logged in.

POT file for plugin will earn you 6 credits, xScape framework 10 credits and themes 2 credits. Theme contains only small set of strings that are not part of the framework. Uploading translation doesn’t get you credits until the translations are checked. You can use credits to get email support tickets, discounts, you can give them to some other user… Since all this is just starting, contact form is best way to convert credits. In the next few days I will announce conversion rate for credits, but approximate value will be 3,00 Euros for 1 Credit. Credits can’t be converted into money, it has to be used within the website. You can see amount of credits on your profile page.

If you have any suggestion on how to further improve the translation system, please leave a comment. And join with your translations.

This latest version of the plugin needs WP 3.0 nightly builds released after beta 2 to work. Nothing is changed for support for WP 2.8 / 2.9, and that will continue to work as it was before. New changes allow for deeper capabilities support and also more elaborate support for different labels. But, to make things easier, with this plugin, you need to set only to labels (singular and plural), and plugin can generate the rest of the labels automatically. Capabilities are also pre-filled, and you don’t need to change them.

Hopefully, these are the last changes before WP 3.0 is released. In the next two versions of the plugin, I will add few more settings for custom post types and expand terms widget to support drop down list display.

If you check official requirement page, you will see that you need PHP 4.3 and mySQL 4.1.2 at a very least. You need mod_rewrite installed on Apache if you want to use pretty permalinks (or some equivalent for Windows or other servers). But, it’s not that simple as they make it look like.

PHP

Hidden truth is that some WordPress features even now require PHP5 (timezone and oEmbed are most important). So, claiming that WordPress will work on PHP4 is false, because you will not be able to use everything WordPress has to offer. To make things worse, many plugins require PHP5 to work, and that include many popular plugins.

So even if you use PHP4 for your bare WordPress installation, as soon as you start adding plugins you are likely to get at least few that will not work with PHP4. Let’s face it PHP4 is dead for over two years now, not supported by PHP anymore (support ended on february 5 2008) and all major CMS platforms are either dropped support for it or will do in the near future. Except for WordPress. And as it looks right now, even next WordPress 3.1 will maintain the illusion that WordPress will work fine on PHP4.

Only the fact that some features are not working on PHP4 is enough to finally admit that supporting PHP4 still, is pointless. Main reason behind the idea is that some 10% of websites using WordPress run on PHP4. I don’t have access to that statistical data, and I imagine that is old at least a year because we got same number from Matt when WP 2.8 was released. Situation now is different, because I tried for the past week to find reputable hosting company that only offer PHP4 with no PHP5. And I couldn’t find any.

Several hosting companies are running both versions of PHP to support some old software and websites but users can switch using control panel option or simple command in HTACCESS. All this is for shared hosting, because on VPS or dedicated servers users install latest software anyway. Newer server versions like Ubuntu 8.04 or newer can’t even install PHP4 anymore (I tried on my VPS.NET server) and I don’t see anyone manually compiling it from source on new server. WordPress recommends several hosting companies and even they offer only PHP5. So, where are those 10% PHP4 WordPress websites hosted?

I had several clients that had problems with WordPress  running on PHP4.4 and in only one instance I managed to fix things to make WordPress works. Problem with PHP4 settings, security issues and many other things can prove impossible to solve in many cases. One of the clients used PHP4 because he had some old server he didn’t want to reinstall or update and he was under the impression that everything was OK, and he had a hard time understanding why WordPress is claiming something that simply can’t be achieved in practical usage. And the user experience and practical side of using any system is what should count in the end, and that is clearly against PHP4.

Even if you in the end manage to install WordPress on PHP4, you will be able to run it only without plugins (or with only few plugins).

mySQL

With WordPress 2.9 support for old and bad mySQL 3 is finally dropped, and for the most part there are no major (or even minor) differences in SQL specification used in mySQL4 and mySQL5. I didn’t noticed any problems with using mySQL 4 (one client has it, and it runs fine).

(Actual) System Requirements

So, here they are:

PHP version 5.0 or greater
mySQL 4.1.2 or greater

I personally would recommend this:

PHP version 5.2 or greater
mySQL 5.0 or greater

Only some hosting companies I investigated had PHP 5.1, most maintain installations with PHP 5.2.x branch, with only some offering PHP 5.3. mySQL 5 is also used much more than mySQL 4. With growing competition among hosting companies, they all try to have more current software installed, and in the future we will see mySQL 4 gone also.

Conclusion

OK, I didn’t planed to write so much, but there you have it. WordPress needs to drop PHP4 with WP 3.1 coming later this year, and that needs to start right now with announcements to users with information on the upgrade and anything else that will push the remaining few percents of WP users on PHP4 to switch to PHP5.

I recommend you check out also:

WordPress 3.0 and PHP 4 – What’s the deal?
WordPress and PHP 5: Be the Change You Want to See

Whether you use Facebook or not, you must admit it’s impact to the Internet and it’s almost 500 million users. So far xScape had only Like button integration. But, this version moves that into a separate module. I plan to add few more Facebook features to the framework (leave a suggestion what would you like to see next), and it’s better to keep all that in the same place. For now, Like integration is moved to module and expanded with more options including support for custom post types. BTW, baseScape theme got another style called Facebook.

IMPORTANT: Recheck all the settings after you update. If you used FaceBook Like go to Extend page and enable it from there.

Breadcrumbs are improved and few issues fixed, and also I have added setting from the title of the Home element (per suggestion). Taxonomy problem with breadcrumbs was also seen in the archive heading, and is also fixed. Problem with WordPress features like post thumbnail not being initialized is fixed.

Even more JavaScript is minimized and compacted into a single file for even more speed in website loading. xScape needs up to 4 times less external files than any other premium theme (we need 2 CSS and 1 JS files with 1 CSS for ShareThis module), some premium themes load 10 or more files. Also, some JS is compressed using new Google Closure Compiler.

I hope that I didn’t leave any bugs this time around, or at least no serious bugs,  so please report any problems. xScape 1.3.8 with new theme will be released by the end of next week. Theme will be called airScape. Soon after another theme called newsScape will follow.

Test all themes and try them with a free test drive, for both front end and back end:

Demo Loader: http://xscape.info/load/
Demo Home: http://xscape.info/