I’m happy to announce the public release of FWP+: Limit Posts By Date version 2010.0929!

FWP+: Limit Posts By Date is an add-on module for FeedWordPress that allows you to automatically filter incoming posts based on the date, age, or total number of posts, allowing you to set limits so that posts which are too old will not be syndicated.

To install the add-on, simply download the installation package for the latest version, unzip the contents, and drop the module into your wp-content/plugins directory. Then activate the add-on like any other WordPress plugin. (For more on installing and managing WordPress plugins, see WordPress: Managing Plugins.)

Once the add-on is installed and activated, you can set up your filtering by going to Syndication –> Feeds & Updates, where you should find the new Limit posts by date settings box.

This box provides two means for filtering posts by their date or age.

First, you can choose to create a simple filter based on a fixed date or a span of time. To set up such a filter, use the Date filter setting, providing it with a cut-off date, or else with a timespan (so that FWP will, for example, filter out — will not syndicate — any posts older than November 1, 2010; or so that it will, for example, not syndicate any posts more than 5 days old at the time FeedWordPress first encounters the post on its source feed).

Second, you can choose to limit the number of new items that FeedWordPress will syndicate at any one time — so that, for example, FWP will only syndicate up to 5 of the most recent new items, rather than all new items, when it finds several new items on a feed.

Note that this add-on only filters out posts that exceed the limits you set at the time FeedWordPress first encounters them on their source feeds. If you set a filter on posts from more than 5 days ago, the filter will prevent any more items more than 5 days old from being syndicated in the first place. But it will not go back and retroactively drop existing syndicated posts that are now more than 5 days old.

Many thanks to the folks at iheartsl.com and metavirtual.us for their generous support of the FeedWordPress project and the experimental development of this add-on. Their gifts and hands-on help with beta testing were extremely helpful in making it possible for me to devote the time and labor necessary to develop this add-on module.

Download and enjoy! As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, feedback, applause, brickbats, &c., let me know in the comments section.

I’m pleased to announce that version 2010.1011 of FWP+: Limit Size Of Posts is now available for download.

This release introduces several new features to provide more refined control over how to limit the size of posts, and what should happen when the size of a post is limited:

• You can now choose whether a post that exceeds the size you set should be simply cut off, or should have the remainder of the post hidden behind a “Read More…” break.

• You can now choose to limit the size of posts by number of characters, word count, or number of sentences.

• You can also choose to have the filter attempt to locate break-points that were inserted into a story by the original author on the source website. (I.e., points where the remainder of the story is hidden behind a “Read More…” jump — the kind of break you would use <!--more--> to create in WordPress. FWP+: Limit Size Of Posts is capable of automatically detecting break-points from most popular blogging platforms, including WordPress, Blogger, and LiveJournal. If you opt to use this method, the filter will first look for a manual break-point, and, only if it cannot find one, it will fall back on any other length-limiting rules that you may have set up.

Many thanks for this release are due to Karl Haro von Mogel, whose generous donations helped make it possible for me to devote the time needed to make these improvements to the add-on.

I’m happy to announce that a new and improved release of Footnotes for WordPress (2010.0822) is now available. This release ensures compatibility with WordPress 3.0, includes a minor bug fix that may be significant^[1], and a couple new features that you may find of use. Briefly, here’s what’s changed:

• Feature: I have added a new shortcode, [backref name="..." /], which allows you to refer back to an established footnote if you gave it a unique name. So, for example:

  This is footnoted.[ref name="source1"]Source 1[/ref]
  
  So is this.[ref name="source2"]Source[/ref]
  
  And this one comes from the same source as the first.[backref name="source1"]
  

  The third paragraph will include a footnote that points back to the first source.

  Props for suggesting this feature go to Jesse Taylor.

• Feature: If you don’t like my default styling for the footnote list (each footnote in an individual box with a little header marking it as a note), you can now easily override it by supplying your own class for the list of footnotes. Here’s how:

  This is a test.[ref]Lewis (2000).[/ref]
  
  <h3>Notes</h3>
  
  [references class="compact" /]
  

  … which will produce the following HTML:

  <p>This is a test.<sup>[<a href="#test-n-1" class="footnoted"
  id="to-test-n-1">1</a>]</sup></p>
  
  <h3>Notes</h3>
  <ol class="compact">
  <li class="footnote" id="test-n-1"><strong><sup>[1]</sup></strong> Lewis
  (2000). <a class="note-return" href="#to-test-n-1">&#x21A9;</a></li>
  </ol>
  

  Since the default styling is based on children of ol.footnotes, those default styles will not apply, and you can apply whatever styles you wish to the class that you’ve created.

• WordPress 3 Compatibility: JavaScript functionality to make floating note bubbles appear did not work correctly in WordPress 3.0 in the earlier version. The current version of the plugin has been tested, fixed, and confirmed to work on, versions of WordPress up through 3.0.1.

• Bugfix: There was a bug, which has now been fixed, in the handling of unique ids, which could cause the plugin to break if you attempted to create more than one footnote section in your post:

  Test[ref]Source 1[/ref]
  
  [references /]
  
  Test 2.[ref]Source 2[/ref]
  
  [references /]
  

  In earlier versions, the use of [references /] would cause the unique IDs to reset, creating duplicate IDs and breaking the plugins. This should now be something you can pull off without a hitch.

Download and enjoy! As always, if you have any issues with the release, or if there is anything that you would like to see included in a future release, please use the comments form or drop me a line to let me know about it. And if you find Footnotes for WordPress useful, please remember that a small tip in the project tip jar goes a long way towards helping keep little projects like this up and running.

1. ^[1] If you like to write long posts where you’d like to break up the footnotes into more than one section. ↩

I’m happy to announce the initial public release (2010.0306) of Footnotes for WordPress, a new open-source plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. Footnotes for WordPress is a simple plugin designed with a simple aim in mind: to make it dead-easy to include decently-formatted footnotes in posts and pages on your WordPress blog.^[1]

The plugin includes three major components: (1) a PHP module which implements easy-to-use shortcodes for footnotes in FeedWordPress; (2) a small JavaScript module which allows JavaScript-enabled browsers to display the footnote in a small bubble that pops up over the footnote reference, for easy reading; and (3) a stylesheet and small collection of images, which control the default appearance of footnote references, the content of footnotes, and the content of footnotes when displayed inline. The plugin makes extensive use of CSS classes to determine the appearance of the footnotes, meaning that you can override it with your own favored appearance from within your WordPress theme’s stylesheets.

Installation: Installation is designed to be dead simple. Download the installation package, install the contents in the plugins directory of your WordPress website, and activate the plugin from within the WordPress Plugins control panel. The plugin should begin working automatically as soon as it is activated.

Usage: Shortcodes are based on MediaWiki’s syntax for footnotes. To create a footnote, you can use the following WordPress shortcode:

This text is footnoted.[ref]With this footnote[/ref]

The plugin will automatically generate a unique HTML ID for each footnote that you add. However, if you wish to set a specific HTML ID of your own, you can use the name="..." parameter:

You can make the plugin generate IDs
with different names.[ref name="any-id-you-please"]Any IDs you
please![/ref]

By default, the plugin will automatically place all footnotes at the end of your post. If you want to display the footnote content somewhere else in the post (for example, because you want to place it above a list of “see also” likes), you can do so using the [references/] shortcode:

This text is footnoted.[ref]With
this footnote.[/ref]
     
And our footnotes will appear here:

[references/]

<h3>See also:</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://example.com/1/">Post 1</a></li>
<li><a href="http://example.com/2/">Post 2</a></li>
</ul>

Download and enjoy! As always, if you have any issues with the release, or if there is anything that you would like to see included in a future release, please use the comments form or drop me a line to let me know about it.

1. ^[1] In fact, I am using the plugin on this installation of WordPress, so you can see what kind of output it produces right here. ↩