Within a few days or so, we’ll have finished the coding and unit testing of an improved WordPress search tool.  Its aim isn’t to provide an advanced search tool, as offered elsewhere.  It doesn’t let you search within categories, or by tag.  It doesn’t offer a site visitor anything other than the normal WP search widget.

As a site admin you’ll be able to configure the search engine so that it offers contextual or boolean search.  We tried a mix of both, but that wasn’t working too well.  With contextual search MySQL can offer rankings, based on associated words.  So if you search for cellphone you should also see results with the words “phone” or “droid” in, but ranked lower.

So, the plugin will shortly be ready for beta testing.  And we’d like to offer to send it to ten testers who can try it out on sites that they back up regularly and who understand that this plugin will do several things:

1. Your indexes on wp-posts will grow dramatically, potentially becoming larger than the table’s contents.
2. Some low-cost or poor quality hosting may not work well with this, especially if the DB server is cranky or slow.  The plugin does its best to mitigate on that.
3. On very very large sites with tens of thousands of posts, the indexing could take some time - during that period search results could be cranky and your site may slow down.
4. The plugin schedules an overnight optimize to keep the database in check.  We can guess that on certain sites you may not want that, so be aware of this.
5. The load on your database of a search should drop dramatically.
6. You should also understand that it’s beta code - it might have issues and you do use it at your own risk.

If you’d like to test, simply comment here, leaving your e-mail address.  When the plugin is ready, we’ll then send you a copy.  We then ask that you try the plugin on your site and answer some questions that we will add to this post later.

WordPress makes, in my opinion, the sin of storing serialized PHP data in the database. In my view using databases to store non-platform-agnostic information is always dangerous, but then I spent half my career working on cross-platform code and databases, so perhaps it’s just me. Read more

To download the Plugin, please read the instructions then go to the bottom of this post and click the download button.

It’s often nice to be able to create a profile page or similar, and to display it in a sidebar. You get to use the visual editor, and you don’t necessarily need admin access. Similarly, you avoid the issue of having to work with the much more difficult text widget.

Read more

Some of our themes use their own thumbnail generation in order to make sure that images fit within a theme.  There’s cropping, and a way to select an image to represent your post.

However, it was limited - you could only select an image to represent a post if it was already attached to that post.  There’s no way of having a stock-library that you can select from, and there was no preview to tell you which image you wanted.  Given the randomness of stock image filenames in particular, this presents users with a problem, takes time, and causes minor stress.

The plugin is also designed with developers in mind and provides fast, easy to use on-the-fly thumbnail and resized image creation.  Simple calls make for rapid development of beautiful, graphically rich themes.  In time we will add features to allow users to change the way their theme looks.

Over at Interconnect IT we do a lot of development for news and media organisations, and for enterprises.  As a result we’ve been developing improved tools, some of which we’ve decided to release back to the community, for free.  This is going to be our first general release plugin.  The plugin was developed by us internally, with WordPress old-timer Mike Little being involved at one stage as well.

Excited?  You should be.  Just a little bit. Now just give us a week or so and you’ll be able to play with it. And if you have any ideas for a name for this GPL work - do let us know!

Our popular Caribou News Theme has been rejigged to improve a few things:

• Our full commenting engine is now available, with javascript roll-up.
• Wide-body scheme which shows how you can change the layout of posts in order to have your meta-data appear at the bottom of the post rather than at the side.
• Various fixes related to image re-sizing which will make the theme work better and more reliably on more platforms - because of a change in WP’s image handling since WP2.6 we’ve since decided that the theme will no longer auto-thumbnail in anything below WordPress 2.7 - if you do wish to upgrade from 2.6 we recommend you upgrade the theme first, then WordPress.

We hope you enjoy this new release.  If you have any problems, support is available in the forums.

Our WordPress demo site is about to be upgraded to WordPress MU 2.8 - consequently there’ll be some disruption to this service this afternoon.

If you need to see demos in a different environment, please visit the WordPress.org site at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/profile/spectacula where you can download and demo all our latest themes.

Well, after an abortive mission with RBS WorldPay (who we’ll get back to in due course) we decided to celebrate being listed by WordPress.org on their premium providers list by re-opening the site to new members.

We’ve done this along with some simple changes to licensing:

1. As I’m sure you appreciate, we’re now a GPL only site - all themes are available under the GPL with no restrictions applied.
2. Membership will entitle you to things such as original source material - for example, the Word Documents for the WordPress User Guides we’ve produced.
3. There’s just one price, and this gives access to the forums for £25+VAT per year.
4. We give no guaranteed support in our forums - if you need SLA’d support you have to head on over to Interconnect IT and ask them about support contracts.
5. But we’ll be there - ready to answer questions where possible.

The idea of memberships is that it’s a way to support our development of future themes.  They take a lot of time, and cost a surprising amount of money to develop.  Whilst goodwill is wonderfully, it doesn’t pay for food on our tables.  Consequently we encourage you to a: join the forum and take part and b: if you love our themes you should give us good reviews and ratings, and mention us where you can.

We’re a community now.  Welcome!

A quick note, really, to let everybody know that the following themes are now tested and appear to work 100% correctly with WordPress 2.8 - however, if you wish to download them then at the time of writing the new versions are only available from the WordPress.org repository:

• Anvil 2.0
• Blend 1.5
• Evening Sun 1.1
• Grassland 2.0

Caribou and Dovetail will be updated and released in updated versions as soon as we can.  We hope you can appreciate that updating for new releases of WordPress is sometimes a difficult and time consuming process.  If you enjoy our themes, why not help promote them by giving them a great start rating on the repository?

Thank you!

Yes, we’ve finally done it - Spectacu.la is now 100% GPL. All our themes are now available for free download.

Caribou Withdrawn - Temporarily

We’ve had to withdraw the Caribou News Theme for the time being, as it’s got elements that aren’t able to be released under the GPL license. Rather than wait (as we had been doing) we’ve decided to say sod it and simply withdraw it for the moment. When it does come out in GPL form it will, we feel, be the most powerful WordPress theme available with this license.

Why?

We had to get with the community, basically. Our plan had always been pragmatic - write a theme and later release it as GPL. That way we would be able to satisfy our commercial aims along with our community aims. But there’s a considerable amount of controversy over the detail of the GPL and in this case the view of the WordPress community didn’t agree with ours.

Now, you have a few choices when your views don’t align with your community - align with the community, change the community view, or fight your ground. Well, as far as we’re concerned life is too short to fight the community or to try and change it… so that left one choice. Well OK, two choices - we could have given up and shut up shop, but we’ve decided to continue with Spectacu.la for the moment.

There Are Downsides

We’re not at all sure if this way of running a club is a winning solution. Ultimately, we only offer our own themes - there’s nothing to stop a rival offering our themes (and others!) and undercutting us whilst offering the same level of forum support. They won’t have the cost of making themes, just of support. For sure, the community may do the honourable thing and avoid them, but I believe about 80% of the people out there aren’t really active members of the WordPress community. They don’t really care where they source their themes, and they’re not going to contribute.

We saw that when Brian Gardner withdrew his free downloads from Revolution Too that there must have been a problem with his model. We don’t know if it was costs, or hassle, or what, but he decided to give the free downloads up. Quietly he was dropped from WordPress.org, and that was the end of it. But he had, somehow, managed to stir up the whole wasps nest of debate on the GPL and when he first made the GPL announcement other clubs that were non-GPL were cast out.

A Promise

We will never ever withdraw our themes from free download. If the bandwidth gets a bit much then they’ll be available in the WordPress.org repository soon anyway (generously hosted by Automattic, I believe) and that will be fine for us. In fact, that’s what we want - we want it to be as easy as possible for you to install our themes on WordPress 2.8 when the auto-installation features come out. This is important and useful.

Memberships to the themes club are currently unavailable - watch the site for an announcement once the new payments gateway is tested (Paypal was too expensive and too clunky for us) and you’ll soon be able to join the forums once more.

Past members who supported us in the early days will be given a year’s free membership.