Warning: This is a development version, and its for use only on test environments and I can’t recommend that you use this plugin version on your live websites.

New version number will be 4.2. My internal build and version system required this change to be made, so 4.1 as official number will be skipped.

After last 3-4 days since release of Alpha #3, many bugs are fixed, most of them related to the Backup module. Now, after extensive testing on several different servers, backup module is working as designed. Still, I expect some minor bugs to be still present, so next 4-5 days will be spend making sure that all these things are fixed. Backup has working Statistics and Process panels that will show you general info about the backup tasks running. Editing of backup tasks works now.

If you still have issue starting backups or creating tasks:  it’s highly recommended that you clean up all the tasks data from the database, and allow plugin to create all that again as it should be. So, go to the Plugin Tools panel, Reset tab, and check ‘Remove everything tasks related’ option, and click Reset button. Now, you should have Backup working as it should be.  Also, from Cron Scheduler tab remove (clear) these tasks: gdpt_backup_job (old backup job) and gdpt_task_backup (new one).

GD Press Tools: About

Cron Scheduler panel is improved, new About page added, few more bugs in File Manager fixed. Some unused tabs removed and many minor things improved. Translation strings are updated, and they are not expected to changed until final 4.2 is released.

So, now we need to test following things: backup jobs with emails notifications, custom files backups, multisite installations backup. Leave all bug reports or other information in the comments or in the forum (there is a Beta thread opened in GD Press Tools forum).

With more and more options added for post types and taxonomies registration, current editor is not very user friendly, with tons of settings put together. New interface splits settings into tabs and adds tooltip information about options. Also, it will use AJAX to save settings with improved validator.

GD CPT Tools 3.0: Editor for Post Type

Styling and layout is similar to one that will be added to GD Star Rating 2.0, and is evolution of interface used in xScape Theme Framework.

Opera 11 with Dragonfly Debugger

Opera 11: Intro

Even with only 3% share of the browsers marked worldwide, I think that Opera is best overall browser available. Opera now has everything other browsers have (extensions were the only big flaw of Opera, but Opera 11 has them), and offers much more. Major issue with Opera is that is too standard oriented (yeah, the irony), and because of that some websites (very, very rare) can look a bit wrong in Opera. Most website problems are caused not by Opera but by websites that use browser sniffing code that intentionally cripples website for some browsers, without even testing it, and Opera is usually targeted. These are rare things, and even despite that Opera is the best browser available now.

For web development, Opera has Dragonfly. Dragonfly started slow some 2 years ago, but now it can do anything Firebug for Firefox can do. Biggest problem is that you need some time to get used to different interface and different controls layout. But out of the box, you get much more than with Firebug including: support for HTML5 storage, Color Picker with palette editor, comprehensive CSS and JS errors panel (with extra info on errors in SVG, Java, HTML, XML XSLT including CSS filter settings), amazing JavaScript debugger with syntax color coding and much more. For some of the advanced features you need to install more Firebug related extensions in Firefox and that will make it slower and slower. That’s not happening with Opera and I really don’t remember when Dragonfly in Opera crashed even with 40 or more tabs open.

Firefox 4 with Firebug Debugger

Firefox 4: Intro

I never was fan of Firefox. But, for the long time, Firefox had one very important advantage (from developers point of view): Firebug extension for web development.

Last week, a long time overdue, Firefox 4.0 was released. I tried several beta versions over the past 4-5 months, and they were actually worse than 3.6 versions. But, things changed for better, and Firefox turned out to be better browser than I expected. Most important thing is the speed and lower memory usage. Apart from cosmetic changes, Firefox 4 has important updates to security, support for latest web technologies, and many changes to the tabs. New tab groups feature is total rubbish, it’s slow and confusing. Opera’s tab stacking is much, much better. Firefox ‘borrowed’ many features Opera has for sometime now like new orange button replacement for top menu.

But, since I use Firefox for development only, I am happy that Firefox is faster and that it’s crashing far less then 3.6. Firebug extension is standard tool for every developer, but depending on what you need to do, debugging can be nightmare due to crashes and memory leaks. Debugging large document with a lot of JavaScript and DOM changes will easily crash on a Quad Core computer with 8GB RAM leaking couple of GB of memory in Firefox.

Compared to Dragonfly, you will need to add few more Firebug related extensions for cookies and color picker that are standard in Opera. So far (as far as I know) there is no HTML5 storage support in Firebug and error reporting in Firebug is not as good as in Opera.

Opera 11: Stability & Speed

Even if you use alpha and beta development versions, Opera is very, very stable browser, even for development and debugging. On the average, I have 20-40 tabs opened in Opera non stop (stacked in few stacks), and Opera is always running on both my computers, one of them is now running for 44 days without restart and Opera is on for 44 days without crashing once (stable 11.0)! On my development laptop I use always latest development versions and they do crash once in every few days.

Opera is fast. Very, very, very fast. Only Google Chrome can be compared to it. There is nothing more to say, because even with new 4.0, Firefox is still much slower not as nearly comfortable to use. Opera is fast and stable even with many extensions active (I have 10 extensions active in Opera).

Firefox 4: Stability & Speed

Firefox 4 is more stable and faster than 3.6. But, it’s still nowhere stable enough for smooth development work I need it to be. Even when I use only one or two tabs active, every 2 hours of work, and I have to close it to free up memory and to close JavaScript that I was trying to debug and that will crash Firefox on it’s own if left on for a bit longer. Opening more than 5-6 tabs for debug purposes makes it very hard to work with. And, more extensions active, more instability. Speed is not that bad as it was in 3.6, but when you do intensive debug work it can get very annoying to wait for something I can do in Opera almost instantly.

When used for casual browsing, Firefox is not bad, but with many tabs active is unusable. New tab groups are massive fail: slow, confusing and nowhere near intuitive to use as tab staking in Opera, and if you are not careful, you can easily close all your tabs with one button click.

Most important thing with all this: things I can do in Opera with debugging I can never do with Firefox with same level of comfort. Only reason I still have Firefox on is to test code compatibility just in case, and because I still didn’t quite used to Dragonfly in Opera. Well, years of using Firebug has taken its toll.

Why no Chrome (or Safari) in this comparison?

I very rarely use Google Chrome and I don’t like it’s debugger and development tools as too confusing. I only use Chrome (as I do Safari or IE) for testing. IE is awful browser in any version (including new 9.0) and debug in it is a nightmare. Only (proper) way to debug in IE is with Visual Studio.

Opera 11 vs Firefox 4

I am web developer for some 10 years, and I used every browser in that period. Opera has come a long way, and right now it’s the best browser for any use. For development, I am now doing 90% of my debug work in Opera, and I will not go back to Firefox until Mozilla do a right thing and make a fully rounded browser that is fast and stable. As it looks right now, that’s not gonna happen anytime soon.

If you are developer stuck to Firefox and all it’s bugs and many problems, slowness and instability, I highly recommend you try Opera 11. You will be surprised how good it is.

Checkboxes and radioboxes, with all Dev4Press plugins, are enhanced using jQuery. Problem with default HTML elements can be that they are not easy to position and control. jQuery helps with that, and make controls look pretty. Multi select dropdown control doesn’t exists in HTML, so it’s much better to replace existing multi select control with jQuery powered dropdown.

But, controls looking pretty is not exactly always accessibility friendly and they don’t matter much to blind users. They usually use a screen reader that interprets HTML controls. But, some of the enhanced elements we have are hiding actual elements making it impossible for screen reader to find them. Same thing happens with tabs and many other elements, but in case of most jQueryUI powered controls, they have built-in accessibility support. For the rest of the controls (checkboxes/radioboxes/multi dropdown), there is an option to disable them.

Accessibility Control

Each plugin, on the settings page got a new tab called Accessibility with one option used to disable enhancements. If anyone finds some more controls that have similar accessibility problem, I will add them to the enhancement control. As for xScape powered themes, same option is added in 1.6 version that will be available in the next couple of days.

New debugger settings panel is displayed on the image bellow. Very detailed settings allows you to control how to display the debugger and who can see it.

Debugger Settings

Debugger can be opened with button embedded on the Admin Bar (WP 3.1 required) or with a static / floated button that will work with WordPress 3.0 also. Debugger window can be displayed as a modal popup overlaying the page, can be embedded after the footer or it can be added as a docked panel at the bottom.

Debugger will display: WP_Query status, WP Actions/Filters, WP_DB object and queries, URL Rewriting status, Errors and Warnings, WP Internal Cache, PHP Constants, Page loading stats and other things. But, you will also be able to add own data there. Plugin will have debug print functions that will output results into the debugger without disrupting the page, you can add own tabs with debug info (for your own plugin/theme debugging) and much more.

Plugin will be released during this month. As announced before, Beta 1 will be released on Monday, February 14 2011.

Promo coupon to get 40% discount for this plugin (for yearly recurring payments standard and developer licenses only): GDPRESSTOOLS4. Coupon is active now, and can be used until March 1 2011.

Sidebar Tabs

xScape Theme Framework got new widget: Recent Comments, that will support similar settings to Recent Posts. It’s built inside the default tabbed widget, and new version of that default widget is on the image on the right.

xScape also allows changing of fonts for all themes, and for some (like newsScape there will be option to changes base font size and content font sizes. Share This module got new sets this time using hover from monochrome to color. Many things are fixed in networks icons rendering and several widgets are also improved.

newsScape options are much expanded from first Beta release allowing some very interesting layouts for all types of pages. To make things even better, by default some of the blocks are not even included in default layout (second sidebar and footer widgets area)! Styling for theme is cleaned up, and the only options missing right now is to set custom design colors. So, get ready for the release of newsScape that will be available on Sunday evening.

Test the newsScape, and try them with a free test drive, for both front end and back end before deciding what is right for you. If you find any problems, please leave a comment.

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

Most important fix is change in lock website option (only logged in users can access the website). This option breaks flash uploader. But now, that’s fixed and credit goes to Frank P. Walentynowicz (http://fw2s.com) who figured out the proper way of doing this. Also, for Pro version, debug print function will include jQuery for blog pages if it’s not loaded by the theme.

Due to the problems with WordPress 2.9 and broken cron in this WP version, auto tagger tool in GD Press Tools got also broken. And for some users there was no way to run it again. So, now you have forced cleanup tool for tagger that will reset it and allow you to use it again. Also, plugins Cron Scheduler panel allows you to run all jobs in there whenever you want. Now you can safely run update check jobs whenever you want. This will work only with WordPress 2.8 and 2.9.

Pro version got new tool allowing you to change the WordPress core update so that you can use auto update to update to beta and nightly versions. This is not something you want to use on production blogs, and it’s only for development. To change this, option is located on Settings panel, Administrator tabs.

Long time ago, there were only few browsers available, most of them (except for Opera) were pretty bad. But then, we got a great browser called Firefox. And soon after that we got another tool, more important than any other tool for web development. This tool was extension for Firefox, and it’s called Firebug. And while we had Firefox 1.0, and Firefox 1.5 everything was fine. But then, they made Firefox 2.0. And if it wasn’t for Firebug, that was the point I wanted to delete Firefox and never use it again.

It was slow, used too much memory, and was unable to handle many open tabs for a long periods of time. They were releasing updates left and right, but nothing really changed. The things were made worse once the 64bit Windows was used more and more. I started using 64bit XP few years ago and using Firefox was simply frustrating. And in that time I started using Opera as a main browser because everything was much better than Firefox. Except one thing. Opera had nothing like Firebug was. And I had to use Firefox still… Yes, I know, there are many new features added over the years, but with all that there are many more new problems.

Good thing was that I wasn’t the only one with these problems, and some people released 64bit version of Firefox. Most extensions were not working, but it was still much better than regular Firefox. Another good thing was that after some time, Mozilla finally admitted that memory management in Firefox is bad and that they will fix that in Firefox 3.

Guess what? They didn’t. On Vista x64 Firefox 3 is slower than IE7 or now IE8, takes forever to load and crashes regularly very, very often. To make things worse, Firebug was causing as many problems as Firefox on it’s own was. Endless alpha/beta version, problems and crashes, but still nothing comes close to Firebug. Or so it looked like. But all other major browsers were on the rise, and things were changing for better.

Opera released first preview version of Dragonfly development tool that over time has grown, and it can do almost everything Firebug can. Major problem with Dragonfly is that it looks differently from Firebug, so it will take some time getting used to. Take into account that Opera is extremely stable  browser. On my desktop machine that’s working without restart for more than 20 days now, Opera 9.64 is running from the moment Vista booted (yeas, it’s running 20 days without problems), without restart, with 10-20 tabs opened at all times, and uses some 200MB for all that tabs. On laptop I use Opera 10 Beta 2 and things are also very smooth considering that’s still in beta stages. At this moment I have 34 tabs (I am not kidding, working on few projects right now, researching and testing) opened in Opera 10 with Dragonfly active and it uses 270MB. Good luck trying to open 34 tabs in Firefox (2, 3, 3.5) and let it run for a few hours. I tried that my self (with same 34 urls opened in Opera) with both 3 and 3.5, and it crashed after 21 tabs on 3 and 28 tabs on 3.5. FF3.5 in the moment it crashed used 730MB. Browser closed and the firefox.exe process still remained running taking full CPU load and I had to kill it using task manager.

Google Chrome browser also has development tools, but they are still not very usable, but that will change. Chrome is also very stable browser and it doesn’t cause problems. Many people I know have switched to Chrome as a major browser.

But the real frustration is trying to debug something with Firebug either with FF3 or FF3.5. In the past 4-5 hours I FF crashed 25 times! It works with a single tab (debugging some things in WordPress and jQuery), but still I hit reload few times, and everything stops. I close it, but even the window is gone, FF process is still working, eating a lot of memory. And I have only Firebug extension installed, nothing more. Many people told me to disable extensions if Firefox is causing troubles. But disable all extensions, and what you get? What’s the point of Firefox without extensions. Many things you need them for, you already have built in Opera. And on Firefox I use ONLY Firebug, nothing more. If I disable Firebug, I don’t need Firefox anymore. And Firebug is the last reason I have Firefox installed at all.

My best guess is that most of the problems Firefox has are caused by the fact that it’s not working well with 64bit operating systems. And that’s used as a excuse a lot. But that’s not right, because Opera and Chrome are 32bit programs running under 64bit, and they work fine. Also, 90% of all programs still have only 32bit versions and rarely they have problems. And for Mozilla finding excuses simply is not an option since they want to rule the browsers market. They were announcing 64bit version when 3.0 was announced. Nothing. Again with 3.5 another announcement for 64bit version. And, again nothing. But, if the 32bit version was written as it should, they wouldn’t need 64bit version.

I know that many people are using Firefox just fine. They need 2-3 tabs opened, they are not developers and they don’t need browser to run all days, for days. But I need, and most of the developers do. So, there you have it, I really, really hate Firefox.

Go download Opera and give it a try. You will be pleasantly surprised.