Before I can release the new version of CommentLuv, I should tell you about some changes that have been made;

  1. No more <abbr><em> tags
    The creators of Akismet contacted me about the tags causing some minor issues with their detection engine and the <abbr> tag wasn’t supported in some of the newer commenting systems available to Wordpress so I decided to use a type of shortcode similar to bbpress or the native WP shortcodes which is appended just before the html of the link. At display time, it hides the code and wraps the output in a div for easier styling.
  2. Different selection method
    I’ve completely changed the code for how the user selects their last blog post, gone is the html drop down and in comes the slidedown div and easy selection.
  3. More than last blog posts can be returned and from more than one source
    This is one of the biggest changes made to the plugin and API, users can now add more than one URL to their account (up to 5) and can even add their twitter or digg feed to the returned items. More about this in future posts
  4. Language support (I hope!)
    The last plugin had some issue with displaying the options page in a difference locale than English, hopefully that is fixed now, I just need some users to download the .pot file and enter in their own language translations. All contributors will be credited in the plugin source and on the documentation page.
  5. Such Class!
    Rather than a mish-mash of functions spread about the php file, everything is now wrapped up in a class and even though I say so myself, it works nicely! See the about page for 2 books that really helped me with this.
  6. Better javascript
    I had to pretty much rewrite the whole of the jquery script that does the fetching and displaying of the posts and it’s working well for me on the Big3 (Chrome, Firefox3, IE7). It seems to be working ok with other plugins that use javascript unless a theme is using an old include of effects.js or scriptaculous.js which is easily resolved by updating the include libraries of a blog
  7. More done by the backend
    A lot more processing of the links is done by the backend of Wordpress now, including notifying ComLuv when you change the status of a comment that has a luvlink in it. This will greatly help to bring about accurate stats on the ComLuv site and to make it easier to spot spammers.

There are more changes to come like..

  • Disable using AJAX to do the fetching and use the old “after comment posted” method
  • Allow blog owner to black list certain urls or reject certain link types
  • Backend connection to ComLuv to retreive and display links you have given and received
  • much more!

Right now, the plugin is running in a stable fashion and when the public gets their hands on it for a few days, I’m sure there’ll be some edits I will have to make to keep them all happy. Once that’s done then I can work on bringing in new features one by one as people need them. (no point to get feature giddy and put in so much that it takes away the whole purpose of CommentLuv – to reward your readers!)

If there is anything you want included with the new CommentLuv be sure to leave a feature request support ticket using your dashboard.

There’s still much for me to do to add the comments to the code so everyone can see how the API is called and talked to. The first release will still be labeled as beta but it will be available on the codex which should give you an upgrade alert in your own WP dashboard if you have it installed already. Instructions on how to upgrade will be posted at the time.