WordPress 2.7 And My WordPress Plugins

I’ve been using WordPress 2.7 for a while now and have comprehensively tested my WordPress plugins on it. In this post, I release the results of my testing: Four plugins work fine (albeit with a non version specific bug found in one of them). One plugin seems to have problems with WordPress 2.7.

Plugins That Work With WordPress 2.7

The following WordPress plugins appear to work fine with WordPress 2.7:

• DualFeeds
• FeedEntryHeader
• LocalCurrency
• KeywordLuv

However, during testing I discovered a bug with LocalCurrency, which I’ll explain in more detail below. This bug is not specific to WordPress 2.7 and has always existed in the plugin. If you haven’t noticed it yet, you’re unlikely to.

Plugin Which Has Problems With WordPress 2.7

Unfortunately, the IFrameWidgets plugin has a problem, which appears to be related to WordPress 2.7. In fact, I suspect that this problem has existed since WordPress 2.5, but only occurs on certain browsers.

The problem is that widgets running in the IFrame widget do not appear. This seems to be related to the JavaScript no longer being able to find the height of the IFrame (the plugin hides the IFrame until it’s fully loaded, then automatically resizes it based on it’s contents).

I’m not certain of all scenarios when it will occur, but I’ve managed to make it happen with the BlogCatalog widget using Firefox 2.0.0.20. For me, there’s no problem in Firefox 3, Google Chrome and IE6.

Kirk M from Just Thinkin’, who reported the problem, seems to be having a more serious problem with the Google Friend Connect Members widget: he gets the problem with Firefox 3.0.5, Shiretoko builds, Chrome and IE 7.0.

It may be that there are two problems: a general problem which only occurs with FireFox 2 and a more specific problem with the Google Friend Connect Members widget.

I suspect the general problem occurs because the way widgets work changed back in WordPress 2.5: IFrameWidgets uses the number of the widget in the plugin logic. Prior to WordPress 2.5, you were only allow a maximum of 9 widgets, so the plugin was using the numbers 1 to 9. In versions after 2.5, there is no maximum number of widgets and the plugin is using numbers such as 320138091. It may be that FireFox 2 can’t handle numbers this large?

I am continuing investigations and hope to identify a fix soon. You can follow this issue in the comments on the IFrameWidgets page and I’ll announce the fix in a post – so subscribe to my feed if you want to know when it’s released.

LocalCurrency Bug

As mentioned above, LocalCurrency has a bug which has always existed within the plugin. The plugin works fine within a single post or page, but doesn’t always work on pages with multiple posts (ie the home page or category pages).

The plugin has been designed to work on pages with multiple posts, but it doesn’t always load the JavaScript that allows it to make the call to Yahoo! Finance. To optimise performance, the JavaScript is only loaded when the plugin finds the <–LCSTART–> tag in the post.

This is fine for single posts / pages. It’s also fine for pages with multiple posts IF the tag is in the first post on the page. However, if the fist post doesn’t have any currency to be converted (ie no <–LCSTART–> tag), then the JavaScript isn’t loaded.

I’ll be fixing this problem sometime in the near future. I’ll probably add an option to allow the blog owner to decide whether they want to convert currency on multiple post pages. If chosen, the plugin will load the JavaScript without checking the posts for the tag, circumventing the problem.

Final Thoughts

Anytime there is a WordPress upgrade, there is a chance that one of my plugins will break. This means I have to do extensive testing with each WordPress release. This takes a lot of time, but fortunately, there are normally no problems to fix.

For the WordPress 2.7 release, I did find a couple of problems – but I’ll get them fixed as soon as I can.

Tags: DualFeeds, FeedEntryHeader, IFrameWidgets, KeywordLuv, localcurrency, Wordpress Plugins