I learned how to use SVN to upload CommentLuv to the WordPress plugins repository last night, I’d put it off until now because I didn’t want to delve into linux just to use SVN.

That was until I found a post about how to use TortoiseSVN to do the job and lickety-split! it was up and appeared on the plugins page within a few minutes.

Putting the plugin here for download was good but it didn’t get shown to many readers, however, since it has appeared on the much wider audience WordPress.org directory I can’t help thinking that I can improve the code a lot more (and that I should neaten it up) so I have been researching how to use the WP function fetch_rss() to make things a lot simpler for grabbing the comment authors last post, the old way was done manually with a long arsed (but very functional) parsing routine.

This will have the advantage of making the plugin work on hosting that doesn’t support the commands I currently use, there’s only a couple of blogs that it hasn’t worked on and they’ve been on some of the cheaper hosting packages that don’t support the whole range of PHP functions so good news for them! The only problem that I see with it is that the WP fetch_rss() function is only available from the 2.1 release of WordPress so older blogs wont be able to use it.

I’ll also tweak the feed finder routine so that it can try a few different places for the default feed, useful for blogspot blogs that have their own domain name and for Typepad blogs that don’t have a standard directory structure. I’ve also added some compatibility fixes so that it behaves well with other comment enhancing plugins.

Release should be today or tomorrow. A big thanks to those that have used it already