Plugin

’t Moet ergens van eind 2009 geweest zijn dat ik ogenschijnlijk nog gewerkt heb aan WP Mollom, een plugin voor WordPress die toelaat om comment spam te bestrijden via Mollom. De versie die op mijn blogje staat heeft sindsdien geen updates meer gekregen. En dat laat zich duidelijk voelen. Ik krijg af en toe te horen dat het niet zo eenvoudig is om commentaar hier achter te laten. En daar ben ik me maar al te bewust van.

Davy started a meme: show off how well Mollom has been performing on your site over the past weeks, months or even years. I picked it up at Wim’s place. Here is the lowdown for my own blog.

To be more exact: Mollom was activated 703 days ago. Until now, 1,355 submissions were accepted and 23,999 rejected. Yesterday, Mollom blocked 12 spam attempts and accepted 0 ham messages. So far, Mollom blocked 13 spam attempts and 0 ham messages today.

One of my ongoing efforts is trying to get WP Mollom translated. I’ve put the plugin up on the wp-polyglots mailinglist and I’ve received several translations. Which was enough a reason to tag a new release. So, now you can enjoy the power of Mollom in these languages:

• Vietnamese (vi)
• Bulgarian (bg_BG)
• Bangla (bn_BD)

I’ve already written about revising the codebase and making room for improvement. I’ve made a small list of things that are on my wanted/todo list.

Another month, a new release. I just tagged WP Mollom 0.7.3. It’s got the shortest changelog up to date, but the translations that are included make up for that.

• fixed: multiple moderation would incorrectly state ‘moderation failed’ due to incorrect set boolean.
• added: german (de_DE) translation
• added: italian (it_IT) translation

Many thanks go out to Alexander Langer and Gianni Diurno for sending me their translations. With only 88 strings, translating the plugin doesn’t take that much time. So, If you could spare the time and you know your way around POEdit (or you’re willing to learn), just go out there and make this plugin easier to use for non-english speaking users of WordPress!

Yes. WordPress 2.7 is out. Your favorite blogging tool has gotten a serious overhaul: a totally new administration panel, loads of bugfixes and lots of new features.

The plugin API has been extended: you should now use a seperate file to store all uninstallation logic instead of relying on the deactivate callback, options should be registered with WP (mandatory in near future versions) and the submenu structure onto which you can hook your own settings is revamped.

Welja, ik ben natuurlijk nieuwsgierig naar de mate waarin mijn plugin wordt geïnstalleerd en opgepikt. En natuurlijk durf ik dan al eens rond te googlen. Dus gooide ik even wp-mollom als trefwoord door Google.

Wat mij opviel in het lijstje was dit:

Inderdaad, een open directory bij Clopin. Blijkbaar heeft Clopin niet alleen de plugin op zijn blog gegooid, maar ineens de volledige wp-mollom/ folder inclusief screenshots. Via die toegang is het een koud kunstje om zijn plugins/ folder uit te lezen. En uit die informatie kan ik meteen een aantal dingen afleiden.

I just tagged version 0.6.1 of WP Mollom in the WordPress Extend repository. Which means in a few moments, you’ll be able to download the latest installment of my plugin.

So, what has changed? Well, this is a bugfix release which means no new features. Here’s the changelog:

• Fixed: division by 0 error on line 317
• Fixed: if ‘unsure’ but captcha was filled in correctly, HTML attributes in comment content would sometimes be eaten by kses
• Improved: the mollom function got an overhaul to reflect the september 15 version of the Mollom API documentation
• Changed: mollom statistics are now hooked in edit-comments.php instead of plugins.php
• Added: _mollom_retrieve_server_list() function now handles all getServerList calls

Although almost all basic functions are up and running now, there’s still a long road ahead. Today, I’m happy with what I’ve accomplished technically so far, but such things as usability, performance, flexibility,… still need more work. For instance, there’s still no WordPress MU version, i8n support is still missing, the backend needs more simplifying and much more.

So, Dries and Benjamin put out t-shirts to all those who contributed in a way to Mollom. If all went well, and Belgian postal services did their job, a package with a tee would be waiting for me at home right now. A big thank you!

Over the past days, there were some hiccups with the plugin not working that well. First, crack groups of rogues still get the better of the plugin. I also got spam in the moderation queue on a daily basis. The service is still under development and strategies are being devised to counter these attacks as we speak. Second, during debugging rounds in the past days, I encountered some anomalies against the API which will be fixed in the next version.

WordPress 2.6 just got released. It contains lots of bug fixes and new features. Like versioning if you work in a collaborative environment, a ‘press this’ button, extended gravatar support and much more. Watch the introductory movie on wordpress.org. 2.6 is named ‘Tyner’ after jazz pianist McCoy Tyner.

Of course, I’m going to test the plugin on 2.6 in the next couple of days.

The plugin got featured over the weekend on mollom.com. It has now it’s own place in their downloadsection. How neat is that!

During my four days of relaxing at Rock Werchter, I received some much needed feedback from you. Over the weekend, I realized there are still an issue or two which needs taking care of. There was also a minor change in the API documentation which needs implementing.