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.

Once installed this plug-in will replace your theme’s comments template with its own. Giving you threading, pagination and jQuery based roll up of subordinate comments this allows you to keep things tidy. The roll up can be told to trigger at any depth you feel is best using the comments page under appearance. Also available on the plug-in’s admin page is the option to use the other included stylesheet that’s more appropriate for dark hued themes. You can also tell it to use no stylesheet at all. This is handy if you want to roll it into your themes stylesheet to cut down the number of HTTP requests a visitor makes, useful on busy sites.

This could also be useful for theme builders as you’d not have to worry about your comments.php again, Comments.php is one of the more complicated elements of any theme. And don’t worry about only being able to use the stylesheets provided or having to hack the plug-in after every update, I’ve included three filters to allow you to replace the jQuery and the stylesheet with something of your own.

The filters

1. spec_comment_css This will pass the URL of the stylesheet through to your function to replace with your own file.
2. spec_comment_js The will pass the URL to the jQuery file that controls the roll up and a few other elements.
3. spec_comment_local_js This will pass in an array of localisation strings that are passed to the jQuery code.

To replace the CSS file you could add something like the following to your functions.php that would point to a comments.css file in the folder of your current theme.

<?php
add_filter('spec_comment_css', 'my_css_file');

function my_css_file() {
return get_bloginfo('template_directory') . '/comments.css';
}

?>

Warning
Some themes will fail to work with this without you doing something to them first. Such as if the theme doesn’t call the comments.php using the comments_template(); template tag or if your theme deals with comments in an unusual way, such as placing them in a sidebar or calling them in using Ajax. A missing or unusual DOCTYPE could cause problems too, in fact there are lots of things that could cause strangeness. However with most of the themes I’ve tested this with it has worked without issue straight out of the gate and even if it doesn’t look right you need only disable the plug-in to go back to how things were so nothing lost.

The install

1. Upload {commenting.php} and all sub folders to {/wp-content/plugins/spec-comments/} or {/wp-content/mu-plugins/} directory. If the directory doesn’t exist then create it.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. You should now see an extra menu called comments show up under the appearance menu in the main admin sidebar.
4. Check a page on your site with comments and see that everything is as you’d hope.  If it’s not then proceed to the config menu and see if what you want can be set from there.

The config

1. The main option with this plug-in is the option to define at which point the comments roll up. Default is set so that all replies are hidden behind a click but with the drop down you could specify that replies to replies are hidden or replies to replies of replies and so on…
2. The next group of options are some simple toggles and the first of these lets you turn off the plug-in’s CSS file. This can be handy if you want to keep all CSS in the one stylesheet thus reducing the number of HTTP requests or if you just want to style it up in your own way. If you turn off the style anything attached to the spec_comment_css filter will fail to run also.
3. As an extra to the one above we have the option to turn on the dark version of the comments. This is handy if your theme is, well err.., dark.
4. If you’d rather drop all the javaScript then the next option is for you. Be warned however that this will cause some styling issues in IE6 as jQuery is used to add some extra classes to items that would otherwise be inaccessible to IE6’s limited understanding of CSS. All other browsers are unaffected and IE6 will still be in a perfectly acceptable state it just won’t look the same as the other real browsers. Much the same as for the CSS, if you turn it off anything attached to the spec_comment_js or spec_comment_local_js filter will not be run.
5. The final option is to hide our credit link and is one we’d rather you didn’t do anything with but we’ve given you it anyway as we’re nice like that. We do understand that sometimes clients want things like that gone we’d just like to ask in return for that is that you think about signing up with us

^*Frequently Asked Questions

Why doesn’t it quite look/work right? Unfortunately it’s not possible for us to check this code against every theme out there so from time to time you may run into some incompatibilities. It’s possible that some CSS in your theme’s style.css is causing issues. You could try stripping out all commenting related CSS from it and see if that makes any difference. If it’s not that then it might be that your theme isn’t calling comments_template() to add the comments code, if that’s the case then you’re out of luck unless you know where to look in the theme code or you can get your theme developer to change their theme.

^*Well questions that I think might be frequently asked.

Download Plugin

Anyway, this always presented a problem for those of us migrating WordPress databases or even, just needing to do a quick search and replace across the entire database. For example, you might have moved office and wish to change all instances of your phone number on a website. It could be mentioned in a lot of posts, and in plugin settings.

And that’s why we wrote this little utility. In this incarnation if you drop it into your root folder it will pick up the WordPress DB connection settings, but if you wish to play safe and run the code elsewhere you’ll have to go into the code and set these yourself.

Ultimately you do have to be careful. This code can seriously damage the health of your database. It will cheerfully spend just a few seconds reducing your settings to rubble. So make sure you BACKUP FIRST!

To see how you can use this tool to aid migrations, check out the Interconnect IT article on WordPress migrations.

If you are in any doubt whatsoever about how to use this plugin, then please consider getting an expert in. You could even contact us over at Interconnect IT.

Download

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.

Downsides include that the theme may not have CSS styles properly set, so for example a captioned image may not display correctly. You should test this widget with your theme, across several browsers, before using it on a critical live site.

Installing the Plugin

You should use either use the WordPress built-in plugin installation process, or download the zip file of the plugin, unzip it, and copy it into your wp-content/plugins folder.

Activating the Plugin

Sign in to the back-end of your WordPress administration (usually your site’s main address plus /wp-admin ) and navigate to Appearance | Plugins | Installed.

Activating the Plugin, 2

In the main part of the Manage Plugins page, you should now see the Spectacu.la Page Widget in grey. Click on the activate text to activate the widget. Once activated the line for the plugin will change to white.

Using the Widget

We’re going to add a box to the top right of our WordPress site, showing the About page with an image.

Setting up Widgets

Navigate to Appearance | Widgets. In this panel you can control the widgets displayed on your site. You may need to add the Search, Pages, Archives and Categories widgets if you’re on a new install of WordPress. In this example they are already set up.

Drag the Spectacu.la Page Widget across as shown above. Be aware that it may be in a different position to that shown above.

Configuring the Widget

This is a powerful widget with a lot of options:

1. The page to show in the widget
2. Whether or not to show the title of the page
3. You can link to the source page - especially useful if you’re using the excerpt functionality
4. You can override the title and set something of your own
5. You can use an excerpt instead of the full content. The excerpt will be auto-generated unless you use Westi’s PJW Page Excerpt plugin which will allow you to create your own excerpt should you wish.
6. You may wish to hide this page from your site’s normal navigation. This may not work with some themes and plugins which don’t use conventional approaches to listing pages.

Set the options as in the image above, then click save.

Now let’s take a look at what’s happened.

The Result

As you can see, the sidebar now contains the entire content of the page, and the page has been removed from the navigation. Edit the post, and add a thumbnail aligned to the right…

With an Image

As you can see, there isn’t much space for even a thumbnail in this theme’s sidebar, but don’t let that put you off, you can change the size easily in WordPress, although that’s a different lesson. Have you seen our WordPress User Guides?

With a Smaller Image

And there he is - all right-sized and everything. Advanced WordPress users and designers will be able to make considerable use of this plugin, and basic users should be able to easily create well formatted and attractive sidebar content. If you have feedback on this plugin, feel free to comment here. If you need support, or simply wish to encourage us to release more plugins then you’ll need to join the (very reasonably priced) club.

Download

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 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.

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.

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!

• 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!

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.