Tag: Plugins

All your comments are belong to us

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Intense Debate Comments makes a significant step towards outpacing the competition. Introducing Plugins

Just in case you missed it, Intense Debate just announced that their plugin system has gone live (most likely in direct response to their competitor’s major announcement). This is the kind of news that I’ve been waiting for a while now and I’m very glad this had now been released. At the moment there are not many plugins available, only integrated seesmic and youtube comments, smilies and polls. Of all these, I’m mostly interested in the smilies right now but that’s not the important thing anyway.

The important thing is that now the functionality of IDC can be improved at the whims of the community in any direction people wish to take it. No more do people need to beg the developers to implement the latest shiny feature, they can simply code it themselves. And thus the doors of innovation are now open wide.

It’s impossible to avoid seeing the hand of Automattic behind this latest release (or as I like to call it, the feature to end all features) as they are the makers of the most popular WordPress blogging platform who’s greatest power is certainly the ability for anyone to make plugins for it. Allowing users to extend the functionality of the program on their own is the single most important capability most modern succesful software have had. From Firefox, to WordPress and now, to Intense Debate.

So now all that’s left to do if for us to add the kind of features we want to have. There’s already quite a few wordpress plugins to extend the comment functionality which could not really work with an outsourced system and all those developers finally have a way to port their functionality natively.

Hopefully, this should free the hands of the IDC developers from getting tied into an feature war and let them focus on improving the stability of the platform and squashing many of the long outstanding bugs.

Imho, IDC has just pulled the rug out of the competition. I’m now very excited on what the future will bring and so should you..What do you mean you don’t have Intense Debate installed? What are you waiting for?

WARNING: There seems to be a conflict with the prototype javascript library (which is included with WordPress and can be activated through various plugins). If after activating the plugins for your blog you are not auto-logged in and your threading buttons stop working, this is probably the reason. Disable the plugins and monitor the support topic for updates. UPDATE: 2 hours later, and this bug is squashed. Activate at will. Now that’s some quick support 🙂

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ComplexLife

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window peeksSo finally my very first WordPress plugin is accepted into the official plugins repository 🙂

This is a historic event. I’m certain that fame and fortune will not be very far back!

In case you haven’t seen my recent page about it and you don’t care to read it, Complexlife is a lifestreaming plugin which is a fork from SimpleLife (You see what I did there? 😛 ).

After adding a lot of features and options to it and seeing that Simplelife is not progressing I thought I’d go ahead and just upload it as a new version. This will allow me to have a more organised development and also have the help of anyone who wishes to improve it.

I’ve already got a few features I want to add and I’m also going to be merging changes from other places where I find them, i.e. the trumblog.

So if you’ve got a self-hosted WordPress blog, give it a go and let me know what you think. I’m eager for feedback.

Setting up a Brainstorm Clone

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Ubuntu Brainstorm has recently gone live and it’s really a great project and idea. For those not in the know, it is a dell brainstorm/digg mashup for voting on which ideas people want the Ubuntu devs to work on first.

I wanted to set something like that as a project which would give me a chance to see Drupal as well which is something I wanted to do for a while.

Fortunately a little search showed me that the custom modules have already been provided here and all I needed to do was install them.

So I went for the latest and greatest version of Drupal, 6.1 and I must say that I was surprised on how easy the installation procedure was. Just copy to your directory, set up a mysql database & user and run the script. 2 clicks later and you’re through. Cheers for the Drupal team ;).

I then tried to install the modules, fortunately, even though I was confused a bit, I eventually managed to figure out that I needed to place them into my /sites/all/modules directory. Unfortunately, even though that allowed Drupal to see them, it informed me that they are not compatible with Drupal 6.1 🙁

Oh well, no great loss. I went for an alternate installation of Drupal 5.7. One mysql db and installation later, I was set. I copied the modules in the correct directory again and this time I could activate them. Unfortunately I couldn’t get them to work as they need specific database tables to work. Apparently there is a qawebsite.install php script in the module directory that will create table structures, but there is not mention on how to run it. Am I supposed to rename it to .php and put it on my browser or what (Doesn’t seem that way)?

I hate it when no INSTALL.txt is included 🙁

In the end, I created a brainstorm entry and a launchpad question for this, so hopefully someome might be able to give me some instructions. Lets see.

If any of my readers have any ideas, I would much appreciate to hear them 🙂

At least I get to play with Drupal in the meantime 😀