There is a quick update on picasa plugin.
If you want multiple users, in the picasa username field, separate users by semicolons ( ; ). You can use the album names inside brackets infront of the username. Separate album names by commas ( , ).
Example : sandaruwang(Adams Peak, IOI 2006);yasaruwan(sivali)
I just upgraded “Thoughts of a coder” to wordpress 2.5. Mostly user’s won’t feel any difference, but there is a huge user interface change in the admin section. The upgrading process was fairly simple and straight forward.
Speaking of the new features, the admin dashboard is really slick and customizable. You can see have a glance of what is going on with your blog in few seconds. The dashboard was there for a long time, but the interface highlights the information quickly.
Another feature I noticed was plugin upgrades. The wordpress upgrading process recommend disabling plugins beforehand. So, when I return back to plugins to activate plugins, there were some light yellow bars informing me about the updates of plugins, and more interestingly there is a link to upgrade automatically. Just of a click of that upgraded the plugin without giving any problems.
I just figured out while writing this post, the old upload form is no longer there. Instead there are set of buttons called “Add media”, which links to media library. You can now easily add photos/videos/audios to your post without any problems.
Edit : First, I thought wordpress is integrated with flash audio/video player, or when you gave a youtube url, it automatically embeds the video, but it turned out to be just pasting the link. However, the uploading is rather nice than the earlier version.
I’m glad they haven’t seem to change any API/hooks, so the plugins that used to work before will hopefully work without any changes. My plugin “Picasa Photos” just worked. Overall, it’s a pretty good release with fairly noticeable features. Worth upgrading.
Edit : Latest update http://www.sandaru1.com/2008/04/04/wordpress-picasa-plugin/
I just updated the picasa widget. Thanks for the comments on the early version. Now, you can select the image size. Then, picasa username field get bit complicated.
If you want to use your whole picasa album you can just type your username. If you want only one album then you can put the album name within brackets(Without spaces). Here is an example : username(album).
If you want to get photos from more than one user, then type all usernames separated by space. You can even use brackets with the usernames.
When I saw cool random photo display gadget at wela’s blog, I also wanted something like that. Earlier I had a gallery2 installed, but when Google released picasa, I found it much easier. It actually optimizes the photos and then uploads. So, I switched to picasa. Fortunately, picasa have RSS feeds for each album :).
At first I thought of writing a normal wordpress plugin, but then since it’s in the sidebar, I thought of writing a widget. My blog was running wordpress 2.1 and either I had to install the widget plugin or install the new wordpress 2.2(Wordpress 2.2 comes with the builtin support for widgets). Since there are some bug fixes in version 2.2, I upgraded to that.
Then, after coping about three lines of codes into my theme, I widgetized it. Then, finally it’s writing the widget.
Actually, the widget was fairly easy to write because the wordpress itself has a rss parser. Even though, it doesn’t completely parse the RSS given by picasa, I managed to use some regular expressions and get the necessary values.
When I finished writing the widget, I realized that there is no point of downloading the RSS each time when someone requests the site. So, I put a download delay time and the stored the parsed RSS results as a wordpress option.
If you want to try this, click here to download. Copy the file into wp-content/plugins/widgets directory. Then, activate the plugin and add that to the sidebar from Presentation -> widgets. (You should have widgets plugin installed)
After all Thoughts of a coder running on my own theme. Actually, I designed, or not designed but just layed the content, because I got several complains that the earlier theme makes the content hard to read. Now, you can read it easily.
The image in the header is taken from Mental Disorder Theme
Well! Well! This is the begining. The main purpose of this blog is to share my experience with you. Yeah! probally it will be about programming, open source, may be some electornics, etc.
Yesterday (rather today morning, around 2 AM), I managed to install wordpress blog on our server. As they always say, it is five minutes install proccess. It was even less than five minutes. Really simple bloging software.
Then the next step was to download a new theme for it. It was also really simple. Just running a wget and unzip. It installs the theme automatically. Then It came to configuring. As you know, a usuall content management system/blog have a admin section to add and remove portlets/menues, edit navigation bar. I was looking all over the place, but the wordpress doesn’t have a section like that. You can create pages, but there is no way to add those into the navigation bar. So, I had to go through
the php code to edit the navigation bar. And then the portlets, I had to edit the code to remove portlets. But anyway, the code is nicely written, so that it is very easy to edit. It will only take few minutes to change the code. Yeah! of course after spending several minutes to find out there are no options for those features.
Except that, the wordpress blog seems to be nice. The main advantage is, it is very simple, so that you can easily customize it. The point is if you have experince with php and html, I think wordpress blog will be a great tool for you.
That’s about installing, and configuring. After configured it, it was too late in the night and i went to sleep. Then the next day, or same day, I had a big problem. WHAT TO WRITE! So, after thinking several HOURS, i decided to write about this wordpress it self.
Anyway, i’ll be writing about my experince about open source products like wordpress, various programming tricks, libaries, etc. So, If you are interested about those, just drop in here once a day(may be once a month ;-)) and check wether there is something new.
All comments are welcome!
