After a complete rewrite, I’m pleased to announce the release of PreFormatted 2.0 beta. This is a plugin for WordPress 1.5 that reduces page rendering time by pre-formatting post content, excerpts and comments when they are saved to the database rather than formatting them every time a page is viewed. The original version of PreFormatted (primarily developed for the WPFF/LightPress project) suffered from a few design limitations but these have been eliminated in version 2.0.
The highlights:
- “Pre-formatted” data is now saved to the database separately from the original data.
- Generates pre-formatted data when unformatted content is viewed for the first time.
- Compatible with other formatting plugins such as Markdown and Textile.
- Extends LightPress formatting by allowing the above to be used. Note that a LightPress plugin (to be released soon) is required.
For more information please visit the PreFormatted plugin page.
Special thanks go out to Denis de Bernardy who provided numerous suggestions, testing and a patch or two. You can see PreFormatted 2.0 in action on both his site and mine.
I’ve just released a new version my keywords plugin for WordPress. Jerome’s Keywords version 1.5 finalizes the new tag cosmos and most-used keywords list functionality. Some minor bugs and annoyances have been fixed along the way too.
By far the most time-consuming part was revising the documentation. The plugin page now includes more “how-to” information and includes most of the tips and sample files scattered throughout earlier comment threads. Drop by the plugin page and check it out.
Known Issues & Future Plans
- The duplicate keywords issue reported by theanomaly has yet to be resolved (or duplicated).
- Add a “relevant posts” feature that returns posts with a high number of similar keywords.
- Enhance the edit page to suggest relevant keywords used in the past.
- Automatically parse post links tagged with “rel” and add their tag to the keyword list.
I’d like to introduce my new sidekick: L’il Stiny.
L’il Stiny is actually a Linksys NSLU2, a tiny network file server for USB2.0 hard drives. I first found out about this nifty device sometime last year when Jim Buzbee published an article on Tom’s Hardware entitled “Hacking the NSLU2″. The idea was intriguing but only took root the other week when I realized a serious need for additional storage.
Out of the box, the NSLU2 is ridiculously small (less than 6″ tall) and acts a file server on your network using up to two USB drives. It runs Linux on an ARM processor, serving files via Samba. Not long after Jim’s articles exposed the unit’s internals, a small community arose dedicated to opening up this little processor for other uses.
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It’s official: the cumbersome title of WordPress Fast Frontend has been put to rest, replaced with the elegant “LightPress”. I happily welcome this change, even if my suggested name didn’t make the cut. In fact, LightPress is so simple it makes you wonder: why hasn’t anyone used this name before?
The other news is that LightPress has defended it’s claim to speed. The test results show LightPress serving pages faster than TextPattern, and 3 times faster than WordPress 1.5.1.
I still haven’t made the switch yet. Why? Demand for my WordPress keywords plugin has far outstripped my expectations, and I’m having trouble finding time to finish the LightPress version! But the LightPress plugin will actually be the basis for the faster (and simpler) 2.0, so the change is coming soon.
My host moved this site to a new server the other day, so hopefully everything made it over in one piece. It was amusing to get e-mails about new comments being posted despite the fact that I couldn’t access the new server myself (DNS issue with my ISP). So if I haven’t responded to your e-mail or your comment has disappeared, please let me know.
PreFormatted 1.0 Released
The newest PreFormatted release is now online and includes some minor fixes. Specifically, a few filters had to be tweaked due to changes in the official Strayhorn release. I also added a fix for a common WordPress problem: wpautop() likes to place your <!--more--> and <!--nextpage--> tags into their own paragraph blocks. This produces invalid XHTML when your post gets split into multiple pages. PreFormatted will remove the offending tags when possible.
I have many features planned for the next release, including keeping a copy of posts in their original format. I’ve been using Markdown lately (on another project) so expect PreFormatted to play nicer with other formatting plugins — my strategy should allow it to detect which filters need to re-arranged automatically.
Jerome’s Keywords — Roadmap
Thanks again to everyone who has sent me feedback about this plugin. As mentioned in a previous comment thread, there is an alpha of version 1.5 that can be used to create a tag cosmos. I plan to release 1.5-final in the next few days, which will add a “top X” (insert your number here) keyword list and will fix the way category meta keywords are handled.
I suspect that the new features of 1.5 won’t scale very well for heavily used sites, so the next major release (2.0) will move to a different storage scheme. Don’t worry, the conversion will be painless and completelybehind the scenes. The plan also calls for an options page for easier customization.