FiddyP

I spent the entire day (minus a 2 hour trip to the haberdashery <- don’t ask!) coding the final pages and scripts for the contest. I have the prizes up and descriptions entered. I was originally going to do 1 gadget per day for a whole month but I neglected to work in how much it would be to post them all!
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After a bright and early start to the day after my scrumptious chicken last night I felt good as the sun shone through my window and now, in the late afternoon, I’m done.

CommentLuv is now updated to 2.5, it incorporates the heart tip plugin as an optional extra and makes it compatible with wp2.5 too.

I spent most of the time separating the jquery and other scripts into include folders which makes the header source much tidier and the scripts themselves much easier to edit and update. The last 2 hours have been spent getting the tip box to work as part of commentluv and the result is activated here for testing.

I’ll let it settle in for a day or so and then do a codex update along with an update to the CommentLuv registered members to let them know about the site allowing them to edit their profile and have their description parsed and placed in the info boxes.

I made some minor changes to the code so that those who prefer the old style commentluv can have a checkbox to untick if the user doesn’t want the last post shown. Hopefully that will make it easier for the previous versions users to switch to the new one.

To celebrate, I’m off for a walk next to the canal with the missus

edit… I had such a nice walk that I came up with some good ideas and my missus’ secret stealth plan to get us to end up in Oxford street gave me time to run them through my head until I could get back to the keyboard and add them in!

I have put in a bit of code that should make it work out of the box for most blogs, most of the questions I get on the forum are solved either by getting the person to change their comment form ID value or telling them that it is working but they can’t see the button and checkbox while they’re logged in as admin.

Now, the form id is found out automatically as long as the comment text area ID is correct and that should be because all wordpress blogs send their comment as POST variables which use the name attribute of the form and for that to work on all themes, all themes must use the same values for the name attribute.

If I know what they are then I can find out the parent form ID easily.

I’ve also added the checkbox and badge to show for admin so I no longer have to spend ages visiting peoples sites and viewing the source to let someone know how to get the plugin working.

this is really the best version out yet! I’ll update it on the codex tomorrow

I just checked the changelog of commentluv and I realized that I’ve been coding just about every day and night since the 1st of this month!!

OMG. I had to learn all sorts of crapperoo for mysql and jquery for the CommentLuv.com site but boy-o-boy it’s been worth it!!

I have a recent luv working on the site and the click tracking seems to be going ok.

I have just added the top 20 sites using CommentLuv in the past 24 hours based on comments received.

and now, I am so in need of a day off or two that it’s killing me!! I’ll try to keep on top of things but I’ve received over 100 comments in the past 24 hours and made a lot more trying to get as many sites as possible that had small issues with not knowing their ID values or sorting out styling so I think I need to rest a bit…. until…I can put in some code that will allow users to use the traditional style of commentluv rather than the AJAX version. hehe LOL I am a gluten for punishment!

I think I have a solution to the spam problem with the old version, the remote script gets hit every time a comment is submitted on any blog running the old version and that includes all the autobot spam which is a bit of a pisser for my hosting so I think I can add something to the code that will do the ajax bit invisibly and if it didn’t work, do the fetch after the comment is submitted but before it gets saved to the database only if some javascript hidden value is set in the form which might make the comments received stats a lot more accurate.

anyhooo, I’m literally falling asleep at the keyboard and I have muchos to do that has nothing to do with chips or databases or comments or even a computer.. oh the bliss…

Right on the back of the final version 2.1 I have decided to release 2.15 which addresses some things that people have been emailing me about since they upgraded. If you’re not good at upgrading plugins, don’t worry! if your commentluv works for you then you don’t need to update if you don’t want to.

The updates…

1. You can choose no image to be displayed below the comment form
2. You can use text instead of an image to be displayed below the comment form
3. A reset to default settings box in case you mess up the values and can’t remember what they were!
4. Updated jQuery code to make it more compatible with other javascripts running on the page

Watch out in your dashboard for the update notice! Or use this link to get the latest 2.1.5 version
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/commentluv/

thanks to Jacob from http://justcreativedesign.com/ for the feedback and Joe from http://imwithjoe.com for creating a mystery suitable for the Scooby Doo gang and the others who are deep in my history page and cannot be found (I must have browsed through hundreds of sites since I saw your feedback so I can’t find your urls to show)

I didn’t really want to update the plugin so soon but since imwithjoe.com and johncow.com have updated there have been a lot of commentluv.com registrations and oodles of downloads so I think I should address this asap. oh, CommentLuv has just gone over 20,000 downloads from the WP Codex ! yey.

Oh how I love it when I’m in the zone! ovidiu from Zice has been helping me with the MU compatibility tests with the new CommentLuv (up to 2.0b r9) and we had some issues because his comment form uses name attributes for some of the fields and the plugin needed to use the ID values.

He mentioned that there are 100′s of themes made available for MU and it would be a pain to have to edit every single one to use ID attributes. At first I thought this was going to be some sort of herculean effort but it turned out my geekness surprised even me when the solution came to me so I have now updated the code to allow users to choose between name or ID for the identification of the relevant fields which should make it much easier for your average n00b to install and use CommentLuv

While I was at it, I improved the look of the commentluv.com settings page for registered users. It should make it much easier for someone to verify their site quickly and start to receive 10x the luv when they comment.

I think I’ll release it to the WordPress MU plugin contest tomorrow or the next day. It seems to be working quite well now on the few blogs that I’ve tried it on. The big test is when the masses start using it, the original plugin has been downloaded over 17000 times at the codex pages on wordpress.org!

You can download the beta version of CommentLuv here

It looks like Google did a page rank update recently and it’s not as vicious as the last one where many blogs were stamped with a multi-point decrease. Fiddyp got a single point dropped on the main page, down from 5 to 4. The CommentLuv plugin page has still retained it’s PR5 at least.

My elottery site actually went up to a 4 from 2 (it used to be 5 though!) and a couple of my other sites had a small increase. Even an old blog that has had a “site moved” on it for months went up a couple of points.

How did you fair?