• I’m working towards a first beta release of CG-PowerPack that’s compatible with WP1.5, thus I’m numbering it 1.5 to match… ??

    In addition to features from the 1.0 branch, there are now some admin panels for select plugins, and a few new plugins like CG-AntiSpam (what I’ve been using under 1.0 that applies some rules and the referrer blacklist to comments) and CG-Pagename (you can do <–nextpage:SomePageName–>, and get text table of contents links/list for multipage posts…).

    I have locally proven out the compatability of a good amount of the PowerPack code with 1.5 (CG-Amazon, CG-Inline, Amazon+Inline, CG-Referrer, CG-Feedread, CG-AntiSpam, CG-Pagename, …), though by no means exhaustive, and only on a local XP box with Apache+PHP5.

    I know there’s a few of you waiting eagerly for some of these, and I’m happy to make a prerelease available (I should probably call it an ‘alpha’, given how unpolished/unfinished much of it will be…).

    Lemme know here or cgcode at chait.net.

    -d

Viewing 15 replies - 31 through 45 (of 58 total)
  • Thread Starter davidchait

    (@davidchait)

    Okay, for all you fun-following-folks, CG-PowerPack 1.5a3 is now up.

    Fixes a whole bunch of issues with the new CG-Amazon ECSv4 searches. Should be much better overall, handle more error cases gracefully (though I need to work on logging things better).

    Also rewrote how CG-WhatTunes actually runs its lookup on amazon, to try and get a hit on the album name after album+artist fails. And now does a much more specific lookup.

    Updated the cg-blacklist file (for CG-Referrer and CG-Antispam) to catch the latest bunch of spammer idjits. Updated AntiSpam with html-in-name checking, blacklist-word in name checking, and some other cleanup.

    And some continuing CGA-Admin tweaks.

    Feedback always appreciated. ??

    -d

    Thread Starter davidchait

    (@davidchait)

    Working on 1.5a4. Improvements include latest blacklist updates (I’ll eventually come up with a system for auto-downloading — and uploading — the latest blacklist entries…). Other tweaks to CG-AntiSpam continue, would love suggestions for improvement.

    Also been working on non-US locale support under Amazon — just proved out UK stuff works at basic level. Improved the error-checking on the new AWS4 queries as well. Also going through and updating the searchable catalogs for each locale. Fixed some interface issues with “Too low to display” prices.

    -d

    I’m still running 1.5a1, but I was just curious if you found whether there was a problem with WhatTunes when it didn’t find a match for Amazon (but it displayed the link to Amazon anyway). Keep up the good work.

    Thread Starter davidchait

    (@davidchait)

    Sorry! Above comment:
    <bquote>Also rewrote how CG-WhatTunes actually runs its lookup on amazon, to try and get a hit on the album name after album+artist fails. And now does a much more specific lookup.</quote>

    Reading between the lines, that meant fixing WhatTunes when the query returns no album from amazon. Been working here for 24h, looks good so far. I’ll have 1.5a4 up later tonight, with further improvements in other areas (no specific WT changes from a3 to a4, at this moment…).

    -d

    Thread Starter davidchait

    (@davidchait)

    Okay, I’ve just posted CG-PowerPack 1.5a4.

    Major fixes to non-US locale support. Should now support ALL ECS locales, though I only checked bare UK support. Also, the searchable catalogs are hand-managed arrays based on a table supplied by amazon, so for any given locale their might be a missing (or extra) locale in the list in the CGA-Admin search-in dropdown.

    Minor revisions to cgaindex display, cga-config base state (Large was too big an image default for cgaindex with average templates), much improved error detection/output for bad Amazon queries… and more.

    Oh, and Blacklist update should catch today’s newest spammers. ??

    Has anyone had a chance to play around with CG-AntiSpam? I might open a new discussion topic to have people play around with it and the CG-Referrer stuff, as they are both ‘rough’ starts.

    I’ll also probably move the major discussion of this over to my site in the next few days, so that I don’t have to check here. ??

    -d

    I just installed 1.5a4, and here are some of my thoughts:

    – I think you got it to use the “non-Amazon” display if it can’t find a match. However, I think I’d prefer if it didn’t also say “Trying to look-up product, the following error occurred: We did not find any matches for your request.” Is there an option to not output that?

    – On a related note, (maybe it’s how my ID3 tags are setup) but I tried a song from the Garden State OST again and it gives me the “We did not find any matches” but then it also displays the correct link/album art for the album. Strange.

    – Just as a side note, you might want to add a “$output = stripslashes($output);” after you define $output (three times in the code, I believe) as the script always adds a “/” after every apostrophe that is output. I always have to go in and manually add it myself to correct for this, so just a thought.

    – Another thing I’m noticing is that the Amazon hyperlinks have changed a bit. On my site I use a dotted-underline when hovering hyperlinks and in previous versions of the code it would always make seperate underlines underneath the album image and artist/album. Now it just makes one underline underneath the artist/album but it spans the width of the album art. I was just curious is this was an intentional change.

    That’s it, I think. Hope that was at least a little bit helpful.

    One other thing I noticed:

    – I have a few Asian songs (with ID3 tags in Asian font) and I noticed that it would never output these characters correctly in previous versions of WhatTunes. In 1.5a4 it seems to be displaying the characters fine in the song title. However, when these characters appear in the artist field, it always displays the artist as “No keywords given.” Do you think there’s a way to get it to display properly in the artist field as well (even if it means not searching Amazon, which isn’t that big a deal actually since it’s usually wrong for Asian songs.)

    Okay last post tonight (I promise):

    – It’s really bugging me that I can’t figure out how to get rid of that “-” between the artist and album and then split the information on two lines:

    [Album Art]
    Artist
    Album

    instead of:

    [Album Art]
    Album – Artist

    I know I managed to do this in CG PP 1.0 but I can’t remember how I did it, and I can’t see to find where it’s getting that “-” symbol from. Surely you must know … right? Thanks!

    Thread Starter davidchait

    (@davidchait)

    1. The error message shouldn’t be there. That’s my bad. I disabled WhatTunes as I only wanted a single CGA query happening on a page so I could debug other CGA problems. I’ll fix that!

    2. Yes, that’s #1 coming into play. I search on album+artist first, and if that comes back null I try just album. In your case, coldplay isn’t listed as an artist for the album, but the album alone comes up fine.

    3. From the php website: you should never have to use stripslashes. ?? Of course, the funny thing is I already DO this in tracktunes.php, where the items are coming in. And I have quotes in song names that are working fine, so not sure if maybe your song-blogger is adding slashes, AND your server is adding slashes, so I need TWO stripslashes to clean things up. But there’s danger stripping out slashes, as sometimes they are proper.

    4. Hyperlinks shouldn’t have changed much. Possible that the CSS isn’t getting loaded, or that the cga-config default changed (‘li’ vs ‘span’ wrapping…). The latter would screw with things certainly.

    5. Not sure — you mean you have unicode song titles? I’d have to see how they’re encoded in the file (feel free to send it along again…).

    6. I’ll look into the ‘formatting’ stuff once I get the next release out. ??

    -d

    As for the stripslashes, I’m not sure what it is that’s adding slashes (iTunesBlogger, my server, or both) but they’re definitely there. The places where I put the stripslashes code has worked perfectly so far (and I don’t have any songs that have \’s, only /’s and those come out fine). For what it’s worth, the \’s appear even in the Tunes WP Admin page (displaying the last 20 songs) but the slashes are removed when the info is actually posted on my site. Hopefully that sheds some light on the issue ?

    Thread Starter davidchait

    (@davidchait)

    I’ll take a look. I’m not sure what’s going on, since I’m stripping the slashes before they go into the tracking file. I can only guess that it is getting double-slashed.

    If it shows up in the datafile, that means that my single stripslashes wasn’t enough. I should almost have you turn that off, and see what gets into the file then… ??

    I’ve resolved a number of the issues, but won’t have time to look at the unicode/asian thing for a bit as I’ve just got other high priority items.

    -d

    Thread Starter davidchait

    (@davidchait)

    Hey folks —

    I’m still plugging away at things. Might do some breakout threads here to discuss Amazon, Referrer, AntiSpam, and others in more detail. Heck, even Inline, which in combination with Amazon makes for cool and simple inserted amazon links within posts.

    AntiSpam is coming along — I’ve added a number of new detection approaches to it. Amazon stuff all seems to be working now, and Referrer stuff still needs a bunch of additional Admin screen work to show people more of the info/stats they’re looking for… I’d also like to get my pageview tracker converted over, as then I can get my post ‘heat’ code converted to a more general plugin.

    If there are any feature requests, feel free to shoot them along. Obviously, I’m still spending more time trying to get CHAITGEAR migrated over into plugins-for-1.5 workability for all features I’ve hacked into my original 1.0 core codebase… and there’s a lot of custom stuff that still isn’t exposed properly (or at all) so will need to continue as semi-hacks.

    -d

    Hey davidchait,

    I’ve been reading this thread throughout the day and have become very interested in your Powerpack stuff. I haven’t installed it yet, but look forward to when I can get the time to get into it. Kudos to you for all your hard work!

    Because I haven’t installed it yet, can you tell me if I have the option of installing just what I want, or does it install the whole enchilada?

    Thread Starter davidchait

    (@davidchait)

    1.5a5 is now up, and I’ve put it off my CG-PP page so I can better manage & track downloads.

    https://www.chait.net/index.php?p=238

    Lots of fixes, plus no-interface-yet CG-PostOrder just because it’s in my folder now. ??

    -d

    I’ve got WP 1.5 installed, and just loaded up CG-PP1.5a5, using referrer first. Just that so far.

    I was using stat-traq and didn’t like the interface and how it worked at all, so I do like the so-far CG-referrer wp-admin interface … a place to actually delete data! That’s great!

    I’ll be testing out CG-anti-spam one of these days as well.

Viewing 15 replies - 31 through 45 (of 58 total)
  • The topic ‘Brave Souls for CG-PowerPack 1.5 Testing?’ is closed to new replies.