Fallen off the end of the world

Just wanted to let you know that I’ve not dropped off the face of the earth, I’ve just been press ganged into coding the new ePOS system for our Chinese takeout shop!

Custom post types, taxonomies, jquery, receipt printers and lots and lots of headaches are being done already and will be done for the next few weeks so please be patient with support requests (please always use the support tickets for support) and watch out for the site changes that will come after I get done with this mammoth task of turning an ancient Win98 system running on superbase flat file storage into a turbo charged MySQL 5.2 and PHP5 WordPressed 3.0.1.

I was originally going to code it all bespoke just for our shop but as I got into reading about custom post types and playing more and more with the wonders of Genesis framework hooks, I decided to make it as a plugin which has the advantage of being able to use a fully fledged database that comes with WordPress and also I’m quite fond of using wordpress functions!

Anyway, this is going to be my full time job (when I’m not doing my full time job) for the next few weeks, it could stretch into longer (gawd ‘elp me).. please forward your condolences if you see me swearing about jquery or mysql on twitter

There are things that are already done, being done and will be done.. here’s the gist of it…

Some things are done…

Updates

The ComLuv.com site has been updated and is now running 3.0.1 which means all the tons of custom plugins and modifications I made to the premium plugins also had to be updated to take care of all the changes in file names and updated functions. I am pretty sure that it’s stable but, if you spot anything strange like 404 errors then please submit a support ticket.

API fix

A few members have complained about commentluv sending back the dreaded “empty feed error” message and at last, finally, I have tracked down what is causing it and (hopefully) fixed it (well, patched it with some duct tape).

If you have saved your site name with an apostrophe (eg. Steve’s site) then it could cause the error to happen, sometimes the apostrophe gets escaped or slashed and sometimes it doesn’t. I have added some code to remove the apostrophe at the time the api collects all your site details to send back to the comment form but, it may still happen.

The solution is to edit your site details at http://comluv.com/member/ and also on the additional URLs page and make sure that there is no apostrophe in your site name.

Some things are nearly done

New Theme

I have been working with Hesham to bring about a new theme to comluv and we have settled on one that looks nice and will do the job, all that’s left is the bazillion tweaks to get it to dance to the comluv tune.

This is what I will be using ..

Luckily, it’s a StudioPress theme which means it is running on the Genesis framework and that means it’ll be a whole lot easier to make love to it do what I need it to do. Go ahead and click the image for a demo of the theme and see how it looks (before I get my grubby mitts on it!)

Hesham has promised to give it the lurve when I get it up and running so I’m really looking forward to seeing what we both can come up with!

Buy a featured site spot

Oooh this is so close to being done, it was the very next thing I was planning on finishing before I got press ganged into writing the order system for the takeout shop. It’s a cute way of using your comluv credits to buy a featured site spot on this site on all the big PR pages over the whole site.

I’ve purposely left the busiest pages clear of advertising so I can get this done, it’s taken (a lot) longer than expected to even get this far but when it’s ready it’ll be an awesome way to get your registered site noticed fast! (and cheap too!)

Some things are coming

Guest Posts

This is something that will tie in with the credits system and also will be helped hugely by Heshams involvement.

It’ll go something like this.. you get a guest posters status on this site, you post an awesome article that is exclusive to this site and you not only get exposure on the front page that has PR6 and bazillion pageviews a day, you will also get some comluv credits!

At certain dates or timescales to be determined, the amount of tweets or comments (or both) will be totted up for guest posts and the person that has the most gets a bonus of some kind. It could be credits or a free ad on the site or maybe something super awesome that I have in my head to do with setting a user up to be the default referrer for new members that join without a referral cookie set.

Oh, CommentLuv 2.82.1 is out

Oops, nearly forgot, I released CommentLuv 2.82.1 which makes it a little prettier and sets things up to be much easier if I update in the future and need to set some settings to new values.

Go download it here
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/commentluv/

have a great week! I’ll be sat at my desk learning how to get deep vein thrombosis …