My other WordPress-powered site, FinalGear.com, receives very large traffic spikes. I used to just run WP Super Cache to prevent the site from going down but Apache would still actually die under the load even though it was just serving static content. Since the site has no comments or other often changing content, the easiest solution at the time was just to throw a reverse proxy called Varnish in front it with a decent cache time (5-10 minutes per page). I’ve since switched from Apache to nginx which solves that issue but it’s still easiest to just leave Varnish there.

Varnish is set up to ignore cookies on the front end of the site. That means I get served the exact same version of the site that you (a guest) sees — no admin bar, no post edit links, and so forth. Getting to the admin area is easy thanks to an absolutely positioned hidden link in the bottom left of the site (hover over it, you’ll find it) so lack of an admin bar is no problem for me.

What is a problem though is the lack of easy way to edit a post. I currently have to go into the admin area and then browse to the post in order to edit it. So I wrote a plugin that outputs the edit post link even for people who aren’t logged in. However the link is hidden using CSS and then re-shown using Javascript only if you have a logged in cookie.

It works perfect but what to call it? My working title was “Javascript Edit Links” but that seems so bland and locks me a bit into a corner. What if I someday want to add other features to the plugin, such as even showing the full admin bar? Do you have any better ideas?

The first is Text Domain and this is the text domain for your plugin, i.e. the first argument that you are passing to load_plugin_textdomain().

The second one is Domain Path and is optional. It’s only needed if you store your translation files in a subfolder inside of your plugin’s folder.

Here’s an example load_plugin_textdomain() call from one of my newest plugins:

load_plugin_textdomain(
	'add-descendants-as-submenu-items',
	false,
	dirname( plugin_basename( __FILE__ ) ) . '/localization/'
);

That loads translation files from a subfolder called “localization” inside of my plugin’s folder. This turns into the following plugin header:

Plugin Name:   Add Descendants As Submenu Items
Plugin URI:    http://www.viper007bond.com/wordpress-plugins/add-descendants-as-submenu-items/
Description:   Automatically all of a nav menu item's descendants as submenu items. Designed for pages but will work with any hierarchical post type or taxonomy.
Version:       1.1.0
Author:        Alex Mills (Viper007Bond)
Author URI:    http://www.viper007bond.com/

Text Domain:   add-descendants-as-submenu-items
Domain Path:   /localization/

An extra line break isn’t needed nor is the extra spacing but I added both just for aesthetic reasons.

And that’s it! WordPress will then attempt to translate the plugin’s name, URI, description, author, author URI, and version fields. I personally only include the plugin’s name and description in my translation template files though as I don’t feel translators need to localize the other fields.

If you need help generating a translation template file for your plugin, log into WordPress.org and then visit the “Admin” tab on your plugin’s page on WordPress.org. You can generate a POT file for your plugin there.

Add Descendants As Submenu Items adds a checkbox to each menu item that is of a hierarchical post type (i.e. pages). Checking this box will automatically display all descendants as submenu items on the front end of your site. You can see it in action at the top of my site — I only configured the top level menu items and everything that shows up when you hover over them has been added by my plugin rather than manually by me.

For more details and to download the plugin, check out the plugin’s homepage.

Please leave all comments on plugin’s homepage. Thanks!

(The checkbox and the text next to it is what my plugin is adding.)

• Thanks to a lot of jQuery help from Boris Schapira, a failed image regeneration will no longer stop the whole process.
• The results of each image regeneration is now outputted. You can easily see which images were successfully regenerated and which failed. Was inspired by a concept by Boris.
• There is now a button on the regeneration page that will allow you to abort resizing images for any reason. Based on code by Boris.
• You can now regenerate single images from the Media page. The link to do so will show up in the actions list when you hover over the row.
• You can now bulk regenerate multiple from the Media page. Check the boxes and then select “Regenerate Thumbnails” form the “Bulk Actions” dropdown. WordPress 3.1+ only.
• The total time that the regeneration process took is now displayed in the final status message.
• jQuery UI Progressbar version upgraded.

As you can see, lots of great new stuff. I hope you all enjoy it.

Please leave all feedback on the plugin’s homepage. Thanks!

Please leave all comments on the plugin’s homepage. Thanks.

Please note that this is not production ready code. It’s still a proof of concept at this point basically where I am just writing ugly code in an effort to get the functionality there so I can test it. Large portions of it aren’t even coded yet (FLV support for example).

I’m only sharing it for anyone who builds on top of my plugin or whatnot with their own code. Everyone else shouldn’t bother looking at it.

Please leave all comments on the plugin’s homepage. Thanks!

However if you know what you’re doing, feel free to install my Enable oEmbed Discovery plugin which will re-enable the feature.

Please leave all comments about this plugin on the plugin’s homepage. Thanks!

So please, if you know of any good Flash players that will do FLV, MP4, etc. please leave a comment with a link!

Here’s my list so far of players to compare and pick between: (I’ll update this list with suggestions)

• Flowplayer (currently leaning towards this one, it seems really badass)
• OS FLV

Please leave all support requests and feedback on the plugin on it’s homepage. Comments left here about the plugin itself and not it’s WordPress.com implementation will be deleted.

Version 2.3.0

Major overhaul, mainly to extend flexibility so that this plugin could be used on WordPress.com without actual code modification (only actions/filters are used instead to modify it).

• Updated SyntaxHighlighter package to v2.1.364. Highlights of the changelog include:
  • ColdFusion brush (aliases: coldfusion, cf)
  • Erlang brush (aliases: erl, erlang)
  • Objective-C brush (aliases: objc, obj-c)
  • Eclipse theme
  • padlinenumbers parameter. Set it to false for no line number padding, true for automatic padding, or an integer (number) for forced padding.
  • rb alias for Ruby
• Commenters can now use this plugin to post code.
• Plugin’s shortcodes now work inside of the text widget again. Requires WordPress 2.9+ though.
• Overhaul of the TinyMCE plugin that assists in keeping your code sound when switching editor views. Thanks to Andrew Ozz!
• This plugin’s stylesheets are now dynamically loaded. If they aren’t needed, they aren’t loaded.
• Lots of sanitization of shortcode attributes. Invalid keys/values are no longer used.
• Chinese translation thanks to Hinker Liu. Will need updating for v2.3.0.
• New filter to control what shortcodes are registered. Used by WordPress.com to trim down the number of them.
• Saving of user’s settings is now done using register_setting() instead of manually handing $_POST. Yay!
• By default, a post meta is used to mark posts as being encoded using the 2.x encoding format. This is bad for a site like WordPress.com. You can use the new syntaxhighlighter_pre_getcodeformat filter to return 1 or 2 (based on say post_modified). See SyntaxHighlighter:get_code_format() for more details. Don’t forget to remove_action( 'save_post', array(&$SyntaxHighlighter, 'mark_as_encoded'), 10, 2 ); to stop the post meta from being added.
• New syntaxhighlighter_precode filter to modify raw code before it’s highlighted.
• New syntaxhighlighter_democode filter to modify example code on the settings page.

Please leave all comments and feedback on the plugin’s homepage. Thanks!