There are only minor changes in this version:

• Modified the behavior surrounding preceding and trailing white space in tokens and values.
• Modified behavior so leaving the replace box blank now assumes a match removal rule even if ‘remove matched’ is not checked.
• Added an uninstall function to tidy up settings when uninstalling.

I hope the white space handling will help out a few people who wish to match strings which include white space before and after their match string. Please leave a comment if you run into any problems with this release!

The full changelog is below:

• Added the option to apply rules to either pages, posts, or both.
• Added the option to match or ignore case in matches.
• Added option to remove matched string, not replace it.
• Reworked the admin page to (hopefully) make it easier to use with new options.
• Added settings link to plugin page.

The plugin can be downloaded from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

The full changelog is as follows:

• Added option to match partial words.
• Extracted regular expression building into it’s own function called by all replacement functions.

As always, the plugin is available from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Versions up to and including 1.0 (0.1 and 0.2 released under the title Obfuscator) are very basic string replacement systems. Versions 1.1 and 1.2 are a little more advanced.

Text Obfuscator development is very gentle and updates are released relativly infrequently, but comments, bugs and suggestions are all very welcome and will generally be acted on reasonably quickly. Also, if you use the plugin it would be great if you could drop me a line (or write a little blog post) so I can see it in action!

Planned features

The following is a none-exhaustive list of features planned for forthcoming releases:

• Advanced replacement rules through regular expressions.
• Option for post modifcations to be made pre-submission (ie. make the replacements before the post is saved to the database), or pre-display (ie. make the replacements when the post is retrieved from the database as currently).
• Extend replacement rules to comments.
• Separate replacement rules for posts, pages and comments.
• Shortcode to build ‘replacement dictionary’ pages.

The current latest version is 1.2 and a brief changelog is below.

Changelog

Version 1.2:

• Added option to match partial words.
• Extracted regular expression building into it’s own function called by all replacement functions.

Version 1.1:

• Added ability to optionally do replacement in blog posts, titles, excerpts and comments.
• Added ability to apply each filter on input or output.
• Fixed a bug blanking posts when there were no replacement rules.
• Modified escaping to use WP’s built in routines.
• Added comments throughout.

Version 1.0:

• Updated to use settings methods added to WP2.7.
• Released on the WordPress plugin directory.

Version 0.2:

• Changes to the way the rules are stored to prevent them getting mixed up.
• Minor changes to conditional logic.
• Minor changes to some wording on the admin page.

Download the latest version of the plug in.

This release adds a couple of the outstanding things on the long-term roadmap (custom field syndication, making the plugin clear up after itself when uninstalled via the WordPress uninstall system), as well as bringing with it a slew of bug fixes.  The full changelist follows:

• Added custom field syndication functionality.
• Added delete operations to uninstall routines.
• Fixed a major bug when syndicating categories.
• Reworked major sections of the options sanitation routine to fix a bug related to first saves (thanks Kevin).
• Reworked the decision making logic around new and edited posts.
• Corrected some malformed markup in the settings pages.

Hopefully this release will fix a few of the reported problems which have, up until now, been the cause of a number of questions and complaints.  I’m edging towards a full version 1.0 release.

As always, I’m keen to hear about any problems people encounter with this release, or any ideas people would like to see in future releases.

Major Functionality

• Uninstall functions to remove all stored data.
• Passing custom fields to remote blog.

Bugfixes & Minor Tweaks

• Add nonce handling to settings page.

As you would expect with a project of this kind, you can follow the progress of the plugin via my Twitter feed: @CzDuck.

0.5 / 0.5.1 introduces a major new feature as well as addressing a number of bugs highlighted by users:

• Added syndication groups: an unlimited number of groups may now be added, each with an unlimited number of servers.  This means that any combination of categories may be syndicated to any combination of different remote blogs.  This has been on the roadmap for a while, but has also been a reasonably commonly requested feature.  Hopefully this will add a whole load of flexibility to the plugin.
• Added versioning to stored options to cater for future upgrades. (This includes a whole new settings structure. When upgrading the plugin from older versions the structure of the settings should be updated.)
• Added the ability to syndicate all posts on a blog on a group-by-group basis, not just one category (thanks jc).
• Fixed a settings array related bug (thanks Dan, TJ).

As noted previously, there is an outstanding bug in the WordPress XMLRPC which may impact the plugin’s ability to post to remote blogs where one or more of the categories does not exist on the target blog.  While waiting for the patch to be rolled to the main WordPress core, you can fix the problem yourself by following the instructions about half way down this post.

Syndicate Out 0.5.1 can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin page.

As always, bug reports and suggestions all gladly accepted.

After talking with a colleague over the Christmas break we decided it would be great to have one complete, ultimate Twitter plugin for WordPress which offers a whole range of functionality in a much more flexible way when compared to some of the existing solutions.

We have our own ideas and bugbears which we will be addressing, but I’d also like some input into the features and functionality the community would like to see.  So, please, add your ideas in the comments below and we can start to build up a feature list to start working on.

This release takes the plugin one step closer to a full version release with the addition of three major features, two of which are the result of user feedback, and the other was always on the cards (although this was requested too!):

• Syndicated posts can now be sent to more multiple blogs.  The settings page now allows the user to add as many different blogs as they require for each post to be syndicated to. (Thanks to Chris, Cat, Danel for requesting this feature.)
• Syndicated posts can send the list of categories they have been posted in to remote blogs.  There is an issue with this due to a WP bug, see notes below. (Thanks to Martin for this suggestion.)
• Posts which have already been syndicated are now updated when the source blog us updated. (Thanks again to Martin for poking me on that one too.)

While implementing point two above, I uncovered an unexpected behaviour in WordPress’ implementation of the metaWeblog.newPost XML-RPC.  When sending categories to the remote blog the expected behavour is that the remote blog will ignore any categories it doesn’t recognise (this is the behaviour specified in the metaWeblog API RFC), however this is not how WordPress behaves.  Instead, if a category is transmitted which the remote blog does not recognise the incoming post is listed under no categories at all.  A bug has been raised with WordPress regading this issue.

While we wait the outcome of this bug report if you want to use the category functionality, and you have access to the WP core code on the remote blog (and don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty), two very small changes can be made to the core xmlrpc.php file so it behaves as expected.  Around lines 2216 and 2469 of xmlrpc.php (line numbers from 2.8.6) you should find the following code:

$post_category[] = get_cat_ID($cat);

Changing these line to the following should rectify the problem:

if ($thisCategory = get_cat_ID($cat)) { $post_category[] = $thisCategory; }

Please only edit that file if you’re really comfortable with it.  Although it’s a very simple change the usual disclaimer applys here: I’m not going to take responsibility for anything which goes wrong because you change that line!

Finally, the following is still outstanding:

• Posting custom fields / post meta to remote blogs.
• Mirroring comments on remote and local blogs.
• Allowing different categories to syndicate to different blogs.
• Ability to switch off sending updates to remote blogs / only updating remote blogs if the remote post has not been altered more recently than the local post.
• Some tidying and improvements to the settings page.

As always all bug reports and feature requests are gladly accepted.