A paint brush, yesterday

A week ago I mentioned how I’m rather quiet, mainly working on a massive update to my YouTube Embed plugin.

Well, my original excuse of looking at moving house is still valid – mine goes on the market this week, so I’m busy painting, cleaning and anything else I can think of (oh, how my knees hurt!). And it’s my birthday this weekend, so there’s some preparation around that (lots of people coming to the house for a day-long party). Of course, once that’s over I’ll be ordering my PS3 and be engrossed in that. However, I hope normality will return soon afterwards.

The YouTube Embed changes are bigger than I thought – simply modifying the original code has become far too unwieldy so I’m going to be looking at completely re-writing the “back end”, as well as trying to come up with creative solutions to keep the code easier to maintain.

Update 14/04/2011

After a review of YouTube Embed on the Yoast website, I now have even more work to do! Joost has provided me with lots of suggestions for improvement. BTW, only 3.5 out of 5 stars but the best YouTube plugin he’s reviewed so far

Oh, and after a house evaluation it would appear my painting of the kitchen was a success – the house price has gone up £5k since it was valued last year and they said it “looked like new”

I’ve been offering free, and usually quite quick, support for my WordPress plugins since introducing them.

At first people used the comments at the bottom of the plugin pages but it’s not the best method to use so at the beginning of the year I closed these and added a forum to the site. Unfortunately, lots of users have signed up but nobody has used it. Instead, I am receiving all my support queries via email.

The problem with email, of course, is that it’s a poor way of sharing information, or requesting from a wider audience. Indeed, many of the support emails that I do receive are asking questions that others have already asked. Either that or the person is rude or simply doesn’t respond to responses.

In a nutshell, it can be a bit of a time waster.

I’ve therefore decided to stop answering WordPress plugin support queries via my contact form and will now insist that the forum is used.

I thank everyone for their understanding.

WordPress 3.1.1 has been released.

This maintenance and security release fixes almost thirty issues in 3.1, including:

• Some security hardening to media uploads
• Performance improvements
• Fixes for IIS6 support
• Fixes for taxonomy and PATHINFO (/index.php/) permalinks
• Fixes for various query and taxonomy edge cases that caused some plugin compatibility issues

Version 3.1.1 also addresses three security issues. The first hardens CSRF prevention in the media uploader. The second avoids a PHP crash in certain environments when handling devilishly devised links in comments, and the third addresses an XSS flaw.

The official WordPress announcement

Change Details

3.1.1 Codex Details

A list of the modified files (between WordPress 3.1 and 3.1.1)

Download 3.1.1 (entire installation)

Download 3.1.1 (just the changed files between 3.1 and 3.1.1)