As I mentioned in my last post, Ralph helped me out with the Drafts Scheduler plugin. He helped find a bug and get it fixed, which was just awesome. In return, Ralph asked if I’d take a look at building another plugin for him.

His website at DrHouseMusic.com is all about House music and the people on the site link and embed from music sites all over the web. Apparently LetsMix.com is a popular one, but there was no plugin available to make it easy to embed their codes. Sure, LetsMix give out a nice embed code, but you have to do a bit of work. Ralph wanted something simpler for his users.

So, out of that was born the Let’s Mix Shortcode plugin. It was a fun project, that took about 8 hours over the course about a week. Due to Ralph being in Holland and me in Vancouver, we were on opposite time zones, which slowed things down.

In the end, the plugin turned out really really well, and I learned a few things along the way. Please check it out if you’re a music fan needing to embed into WordPress.

It’s been a long time since I updated here, and I need to get back to it.

Drafts Scheduler seems popular with people who use it, and it’s been updated to version 1.5 – however there is a glitch in the WordPress.org repository that doesn’t show the accurate last modified date. It should be April 2011, not January.

The latest version fixes a bug where Drafts Scheduler would post all of your content on saving, not scheduling them.

Thanks to Ralph for finding and suggesting the fix for the bug, and everyone else for believing in the plugin.

Today I released version 1.3 of my WordPress plugin, Drafts Scheduler. I had initially numbered it 1.2 and added an Undo feature that was noted as missing by BlueFur in his review. Seemed like a good idea. I had noted that there was no undo feature in the notes and of course it caused people some issues.

So in v1.2, I added the ability to undo the most recent set of scheduled posts. If any of those posts were already published, the plugin doesn’t reset their status. It was simple. I’d started out making harder than it needed to be, but after ignoring it for a week, I found the solution.

In v1.3, I added 2 new features to Drafts Scheduler, both suggested by users who sent feedback.

1. Check for the existence of drafts before showing the options.
2. Schedule an exact number of posts per day in “Surprise Me” mode.

I also moved the menu option from the TOOLS area up into the POSTS area where it makes more sense.

Anyway, I hope these features work for everyone and I look forward to more feedback.

I released a new plugin for WordPress today that’s pretty simple. It does just one thing – schedules your drafts.

Based on your settings, starting from a specific date it will schedule all of your drafts to be published at some time in the future.

You can schedule drafts sequentially in the order they were written, or randomly, at specified intervals, or they can be scheduled entirely randomly – but with a few guidelines. The fully random option lets you set a maximum posts per day, then chooses a random number between 0 and that, and also lets you set the start and end times of the day when the post is made.

That’s about all it does, simple. It is now available in the WordPress repository for download. I’d appreciate your feedback – you can leave me a comment below or contact me directly if you wish.

I’ve been pretty bad about posting here, but busy responding to requests. Thanks to everyone who has been using my services. You sure keep me busy.

On top of customer support, my family and my day job, I’ve been working with Alex Shalman and John Chow to build an awesome plugin for comments on WordPress sites. Standout Comments is now up to version 0.95 and has been quite popular with those who use it.

As with most things WordPress, it’s been a community effort. Not only with John and Alex helping me get it done and marketed, but also with the awesome users of the plugin sending in bug reports, feature requests and suggestions. It’s truly amazing in a way I hadn’t imagined.

It’s also quite challenging as the number of variations of WordPress themes and installation situations start to emerge. Wow. Talk about “I hadn’t thought of that.”

StandoutComments generally let’s you integrate your marketing efforts into your comment form and take advantage of the fact the user is entering their email, but not in a sneaky way. The user is given the option to opt-in to your auto-responder and/or your Feedburner email feed. They can also follow you on Twitter.

StandoutComments features:

• Full integration and customization with any WordPress theme
• Subscribe to notifications of new comments on posts
• Integrate with any auto-responder to grow your list
• Integrate with FeedBurner email to notify users of new posts
• Integrate with Twitter:
  • Users enter Twitter ID to show Twitter avatar instead of Gravatar
  • Display Follow site owner on Twitter below comment form
  • OR Integrate with Twitter’s @anywhere to display a Twitter Follow button
  • Use Twitter’s @anywhere to link Twitter IDs in your entire blog with hovercards (@installedforyou)
  • Use popular short url providers to display a Tweetback URL
  • Track Tweetbacks and integrate them as comments
• Nearly all text and styles can be customized to suit your blog.

Anyway, version 0.95 was just released today and expands on the features we have, and finally includes the Unsubscribe option. Yeah, it should have been there from day 1 but wasn’t.

Next up I’m making sure it’s ready for WordPress 3.0 in general (ie: still works), enhanced features for 3.0, and also the WordPress 3.0 multisite option, which may be important now that WordPress mu is integrated with core.