Talkin Tech

Everything and anything to do with technology in today’s world.

Organize Series 2.0 Final Release

By Darren on March 23, 2008

It’s out. I decided I’m happy enough with the current codebase to put a final release of Organize Series 2.0 out. Thanks to all the people who gave feedback on the Organize Series 2.0 Beta forums:

With their help I was able to address some things I might have missed. As it is, there is still the possibility that I may miss some bugs so if you come across any please post here.

With the release of Organize Series 2.0 I’ve decided to stop supporting all earlier versions (I just don’t have the time). I’ve completely rewritten the Organize Series Page and have also started a Organize Series Usage Tips series.

Oh, one more thing…OrgSeries 2.0 is all spiffed and ready for WordPress 2.5 too

Happy Easter!

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Posted in Neurotic Plugins, Organize Series, Talkin Tech, WordPress | Tagged Organize Series, plugin releases, plugins, WordPress, WP 2.5 | 2 Responses

Introduction to Organize Series Usage Tips

By Darren on March 23, 2008

This entry is part 1 of 10 in the series Organize Series Usage Tips

When I first started off in the WordPress blogging world there are a few things I discovered fairly quickly:

WordPress is a kick-butt platform for publishing on the web. It’s not only a great tool for typical blogging usage but also makes a great system for designing CMS based websites.
There’s an awesome community behind WordPress. Having such a big and helpful community certainly makes learning and using WordPress all the more easier.
There’s tons of plugins that extend the capabilities of what WordPress can do.
I like tweaking and playing with the codebase of WordPress.
There’s nothing built into the core for handling series of articles…

That last point was something that I encountered more and more as developed other websites (in particular my sermons website at UnashamedSermons.com). Out of that need and not finding a plugin to meet that need I went on to write what is now known as the Organize Series WordPress Plugin. Of course, shortly after the first release I was pointed to the “InSeries Plugin” currently being maintained by Travis Snoozy. He’s doing good work with In-Series but bleh, I decided a little competition won’t hurt (and I like my approach to series a bit better ).

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Posted in Neurotic Plugins, Organize Series, Talkin Tech, WordPress | 2 Responses

Be careful using the Automatic Plugins upgrades in WordPress 2.5

By Darren on March 18, 2008

Well the long awaited sequel to the 2.3 branch of WordPress is almost out the door. Release Candidate 1 of WordPress 2.5 is now available for those brave souls who want to do some testing before the final release. WordPress 2.5 has been covered pretty well on the blogosphere so I’m not going to go into all the details here but I did want to write a post about one new feature that could cause some problems with users upgrading.

WordPress 2.5 comes with the ability for blog owners to upgrade their plugins automatically via the Plugins Page. “Automatic Upgrade” means that instead of having to download the plugin and then ftp it to your server, you can simply click the “upgrade automatically” link and WordPress will take care of everything for you. (click the picture below to see what it looks like)

It’s a great idea and definitely one that will work okay with most basic plugins but here’s the problem(s):

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Posted in Talkin Tech, WordPress | Tagged automatic upgrade, bugs, plugin design, WordPress, wordpress 2.5, WordPress plugins | 20 Responses

Organize Series 2.0 Beta 1 Release

By Darren on March 4, 2008

UPDATE: Organize Series 2.0 Final has been released. You can get it here.

Finally, I’ve reached the point where I can release a beta version of the Organize Series 2.0! It’s been a long time in the making and I’m glad to finally have reached this stage. UnfoldingNeurons.com is now running on WordPress 2.3.3 and I’ve installed OrgSeries and all seems well.

I’m still going through the code and cleaning it up, adding internal documentation, and structuring the files so it’s a bit more intuitive. I also want to get OrgSeries 2.0 ready for WordPress 2.5 before I do a final release. However, since I know so many people have been patiently waiting for me to get this version out the door I decided to release the Beta for those brave souls who want to give it a go. REMEMBER though, that this is a BETA release and I take no responsibility for any problems you may have with it. I’m hoping that releasing this BETA will also lead to some great feedback from users, helping me to improve it in time for the big release.

...This is a preview of Organize Series 2.0 Beta 1 Release.
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Posted in Neurotic Plugins, Organize Series, Talkin Tech, WordPress | Tagged Organize Series, plugin releases, plugins, WordPress | 19 Responses

Making some noise: HP Printer problems…

By Darren on October 26, 2007

All right - here’s another rant post. Our church bought an HP7410 All in One printer at the beginning of 2007 and prior to the purchase I wanted to make sure that any printer we got would be Vista compatible knowing that eventually the church would start using the new OS. Research indicated that this model would be Vista compatible. When we originally bought it the printer worked great and I never had any problems getting it working and working well (aside from the HP bloatware anyway their famous for…who designed their install program?).

Enter in my recent laptop purchase in August of this year which runs on Vista. I installed the correct Vista drivers as posted on the HP site and seemed to have no problems - but alas that was an illusion. For the past couple of months I’ve been experiencing the following problems:

Duplex printing doesn’t work properly: The printer has an automatic duplexer but portrait printouts have the reverse side printing opposite to what it should be (landscape duplexes print correctly). Thanks to some help from an HP customer who discovered a unofficial patch (from Microsoft!) that “fixed” the problem I’m able to resolve this. But…

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Posted in Talkin Tech | Tagged Rants, Tech Review | 10 Responses