meyerweb.com

There’s a new beta of MW Latest Tweet available. It does four new things. Four and a half if you count the new options setting as a half.

1. All the files are in the mw_latest_tweet directory now, instead of having the plugin PHP outside of that directory like 1.0 did. Yeah, I know, that should’ve been the case all along. Sorry! Learning on the job here.

   If you’re upgrading from 1.0, you should probably delete the 1.0 file and directory outright before uploading the 1.1b1 directory. Alternatively, you should be able to upload 1.1b1, deactivate 1.0, activate 1.1b1, and then delete just the 1.0 PHP file. I haven’t tried that, so I don’t know if it will actually work, but it seems like it should.

2. URLs within a tweet are turned into hyperlinks for easy clickin’. To go with this new feature, there’s a new option on the settings page to either shorten displayed URLs, like twitter.com does, or to not shorten them. The default is to shorten, which means any URL 29 or more characters long gets shortened to 27 characters and gains a trailing ellipsis. Again, like Twitter does it—although I used an ellipsis entity and not three periods.

   Note that if you upgrade from 1.0 to 1.1b1, this setting may default to “No” instead of “Yes”. I’m not sure why, but it’s a pretty low-priority item right now.

3. On a related note, @names are autolinked as well. I’m using the pattern [A-Za-z0-9_] since that’s what Twitter says are valid characters for a username even though if you type in a grawlix on the signup page it will tell you, in nice bold green letters, that it’s available.

4. If you want to see everything the plugin has cached, append &debug to the end of the plugin’s setting page URL and hit return. You’ll get the settings page with a dump of the cached data at the end. This is clumsy and will be much less so before 1.1 final. I’m thinking click a link, enter debug mode. Probably won’t go all AJAXy, though you never know.

So that’s the state of things. Let me know if anything breaks.