This is a pretty pedestrian way to break a month’s silence, but the 0.2 version of WP-Cats is out. I’ve rewritten the JavaScript so that I’m no longer completely ashamed of it; the closures are a lot cleaner now, and it makes extensive use of jQuery for DOM manipulation and bits of animation.

There’s also a cool new feature where if you add a category to a particular post, you can double-click the plus-button on another post to add the same category to that one. This could be handy if you’ve created a new category and want to quickly go through and tag a bunch of posts with it.

In this release, I made a really serious effort to remove dependencies on Wordpress code, especially on the WP admin panel markup. Using jQuery offers greater flexibility regarding what can be conveniently used as JavaScript hooks, and this time around the main hooks are all inserted by a filter, hopefully making the overall system much more tolerant of future upgrades. Oh, and it all works on Safari now.

No functionality changes, but I spent an hour on the Clipper yesterday figuring out how to make WP-Cats work with WP 2.2.2.

Admittedly, WP-Cats is a more sophisticated plugin than some in the degree to which it interacts with core code, but my first experience contributing to a major open-source project has been a little mixed. My attempt to interact with the team received no response, and I can tell by checking out the trunk that the next point release of WP is going to—again—break the basic interface upon which WP-Cats relies.

Despite this, I think the plugin provides useful and worthwhile functionality in an elegant little package, and I’ve had dozens of thank-you emails about it over the past year; that’s motivation enough to carry on. So enjoy!

A handful of people emailed me about WP-Cats not working with the newest Wordpress. I’ve fixed the problem now—the compatible version is available as WP-Cats 0.13a. Over the past couple months, I’ve also received a number of feature requests for it, many of which I think would be useful and sensible, so expect to see a proper update at some point in the future.

Also, I now have a much better understanding of how to properly use closures and JS objects, so that truly heinous JavaScript will get cleaned up a bit, too.

I’ve been on Wordpress for just a month, but I’ve got a first plugin to release: WP-Cats, an elegant tool that adds Ajax category management to to the Manage Posts screen.

A pretty girl told me recently that she found my writing here to be charmingly pedantic. You know, as opposed to pretentious, preposterous, or perhaps sophomoric. The warm fuzzies faded quickly, however, when she mentioned that the site was rather slow to load—a problem of which I’ve been aware for quite some time.

This problem is now solved. In between book-writing and work, I buckled down and finished up porting things over to Wordpress. So here we are.

Expect words.