Tag: digest-post

Positive WordPress Plugin News

Last January, I tried an experiment over at Grand Strand Bloggers with the Digest Post plugin. I have a Yahoo Pipe that gathers together all of the RSS feeds for all of the blogs in the GSB blogroll. This plugin is supposed to take a feed and in automated fashion make a summary post of all the items in that feed. I set it up last January and it sorta kinda worked. It did actually collect the links and correctly create the post in fine fashion, it just didn’t fire off the way it was supposed to. I took the guts of it and rewrote it as an ecto plugin that I’ve been using (when I think about it) to do a semi-manual version of the same thing.

On Monday, I upgraded all my blogs to WordPress 2.8. I was shocked and pleasantly surprised when the Digest Post plugin actually fired Tuesday morning, making a big ass post. I was even more pleasantly surprised when it did it again today, and started up from the point the previous one had left off. At this point, I’m expecting a nice concise round up post every day with the previous 24 hours Grand Strand blog activity. That is just so nice that it might make me weep. Whatever in WordPress was making it fire between sporadically and never seems to have been fixed and now this is back on track. After the problems of the last few days, it’s nice to have a plugin I had written off spring to life and work better than ever.

An Escrow System for WordPress Plugins

Over on Grand Strand Bloggers, I want to try out this plugin that automatically makes digest posts. That is perfect for what we want to do. However, the plugin I”m trying to use is really half-baked and appears abandoned. I’d think about adding to this with our needs at GSB if there was a way to do so.

That plugin also uses the WordPress cron functionality. I have installed on several blogs the WP-Crontrol plugin to give better access to this system. However, it seems like WP has had API drift that makes it no longer work right. I can see the cron jobs but no longer edit them or execute them like I used to be able to. I’d also be willing to work on that one too.

Is there a formal process for taking over abandoned WP plugins? Suppose I have a patch to submit and the original developer is no longer involved or completely incommunicado. Can someone from wordpress.org eventually give me access to SVN or commit patches for me? Or do I have to take their code, fork it and just work from there? It would probably be nicer to do it down the path of the original plugin, so that everyone’s automatic updaters allow them to get the newer versions. Still, anything is better than nothing.