I must admit that I have a liking for FCKEditor over and above what comes as standard with WordPress and the FCKEditor for WordPress plugin has been addressing my preference for a while now. However, its most recent release dates from last April and its integration with WordPress 2.6.x has been leaving a lot to be desired. In that vein, I have decided to collect a few of them here:

1. Automatic saves: the idea behind this feature of WordPress is that you aren’t hitting the save button that often at all. In fact, given that hitting save creates a revision and an extra record in your database, it really isn’t something that you should be doing very often anyway. Unless, you don’t mind a bloated database, it’s probably best to avoid that habit of saving every few minutes like I do when using Word.
2. Word count: this doesn’t update without saving a revision while it should update periodically in a manner akin to the automatic saves.
3. Insertion of media such as images: this is just broken and it takes away the possibility of having galleries and captions without manual work.

What I have above are the major inconsistencies but there have always been annoyances like the adding unwanted   entities allover the place, probably a habit of FCKEditor itself anyway. Nevertheless, it’s the integration work that really shows the lack of attention. Maybe, it’s time to move Dean Lee’s labour of love over to a fully community-maintained course of development. I know that it’s hard to see your “baby” leave you and take flight but I am inclined that it’s the best way forward when you considered how rapidly WordPress has been changing over the last year. Some moves have been made towards this but they really do need to go further.

WordPress 2.6 added post revisions as a new feature that is turned on by default. In an earlier post, I described how you could control this by editing wp-config.php and there are a number of plugins that purport to provide the same level of control through the administration screens. Even so, I decided to look at things from the housekeeping side of things and create my own plugin for clearing the database of revisions at one swoop. Currently, it takes out all revisions but I am thinking of adding the facility for selecting which revision to keep and which to delete. It goes without saying that you should back up your database first in case anything might go wrong.

Download Remove Revisions 1.0

Now that WordPress 2.6 is out, it is time to introduce a new version of Countrytones to the public. A few CSS tweaks have been needed to the original version after the changes that have been made to the administration interface for 2.6. Those screens still look largely the same with this release as they did before but for the styling of things like the bubble that alerts you to the availability of plugin upgrades, among other things.

Download Countrytones 1.0.1

The final release of WordPress 2.5 isn’t out yet but that hasn’t stopped me playing around with it and spotting a bug or two. Along the way, I have taken the chance to create a plugin that takes the old Earthtones palate into the new world. To do this, I have taken the WordPress Classic colours stylesheet along with some template code from planetOzh and tweaked it accordingly. I may not have got to every possible nook and cranny for colouration but I hope to have covered most of them. You may even find it useful yourself.

See a Screenshot

Download Countrytones

Looking through Google Analytics for my websites, I have always been struck by the lack of IE7 uptake seemingly apparent from the statistics. However, I recently discovered that there may be a reason for this. I use the Ultimate GA plugin with my WordPress blogs and that adds the JavaScript code block near the bottom of the page. However, I recently saw that giving me scripting errors in IE7 and a spot of manual coding saw it travel to the header section of the web page. That, and the deactivation of the said plugin, was sufficient to rid of the errors in question. Seeing the effect of my changes on the reported share of visitors using IE7 could be interesting. It might even boost the Vista numbers as well.