The Biggest Fight for the Future - by vagabond

If you care about anything in this modern-day, if you are passionate about it in any way shape or form be it your religious beliefs, freedom of speech, democracy, music, science, social networking, climate change, protesting, books, or, well, anything and you use the internet in some way to participate you really, really ought to pay attention to this. Congress scooted the bill around to act as though it was no longer in play but it is. These bills SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PROTECT-IP (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property) Act would quite literally spell the death of the internet as we know it. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

From WordPress:

You may have heard people talking/blogging/twittering about SOPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act. The recent SOPA-related boycott of GoDaddy was all over the news, with many people expressing their outrage over the possibilities of SOPA, but when I ask people about SOPA and its sister bill in the Senate, PIPA (Protect IP Act), many don’t really know what the bills propose, or what we stand to lose. If you are not freaked out by SOPA/PIPA, please: for the next four minutes, instead of checking Facebook statuses, seeing who mentioned you on Twitter, or watching the latest episode of whatever it is people watch, watch this video (by Fight for the Future).

Stop SOPA/PROTECT-IP

Stop SOPA/PROTECT-IP

What you can do

Go to Stop American Censorship for more information and a bunch of ways you can take action quickly, easily, and painlessly. The Senate votes in two weeks, and we need to help at least 41 more senators see reason before then. Please. Make your voice heard.

Installing Lightbox Plus (August 2011)

Good plugins lightbox plus Q8lol

From Plugins – Lightbox Plus For WordPress @ Q8lol.me

Lightbox Plus WordPress Plug In Overview (November 2011)

Lightbox Plus WordPress Plug In Overview

From WordPress Favorite Plugins @ Intentional Magic

Displaying an External Site with Lightbox Plus (January 2012)

External website inside WordPress using Lightbox Plus

From External website inside WordPress using Lightbox Plus @ HotWPMag

First fire of the season

Lightbox Plus is updated to version 2.4.5 which include compatibility with WordPress 3.3 and also updated Colorbox to version 1.3.19. This is an interim release to bring Lightbox Plus up to compatibility with version 3.3 or WordPress. I am currently in the process of preparing a beta release of version 2.5 which has a major interface overhaul as well as the addition of numerous options such as the ability to position the lightbox in a specific location on a page, the ability to set the position of the lightbox to stay in the viewport even when the page is scrolled, per page usage of Lightbox Plus and the ability to auto-launch the lightbox on page load.

See the rest of the post after the jump for details.

2.4.5

• Updated compatibility with WordPress 3.3
• Updated ColorBox to verion 1.3.19
  • Fixed bug related to using the ‘fixed’ property.
  • Optimized the setup procedure to be more efficient.
  • Removed $.colorbox.init() as it will no longer be needed (will self-init when called).
  • Removed use of $.browser.
  • Fixed a regression where Flash content displayed in ColorBox would be reloaded if the browser window was resized.
  • Added safety check to make sure that ColorBox’s markup is only added to the DOM a single time, even if $.colorbox.init() is called multiple times. This will allow site owners to manually initialize ColorBox if they need it before the DOM has finished loading.
  • Changed the slideshow behavior so that it immediately moves to the next slide when the slideshow is started.
  • Minor regex bugfix to allow automatic detection of image URLs that include fragments.

You can get the latest download of Lightbox Plus at WordPress.org and 23systems or download Lightbox Plus 2.4.6 directly.

For support please submit a support request  though the support form.  For questions of comments please post a message in the Lightbox Plus forum on my site.

Please contact me using one of the following links to let me know if you are interested in beta-testing or translating or both.

See after the jump for details of the new changes.

Upcoming changes to version 2.5

• Added positioning options
• Absolute top, right. bottom, left positioning. Now able to specify horizontal and vertical position in viewport as opposed to center only.
• Fixed positioning that allows lightbox stays on page when scrolled.
• Rebuilt interface
• Changed interface to a combination of collapsible and tabbed to make it more concise and usable
• Separate settings into logical groups within tabs
• Added enhanced instructions and details of usage.*
• Improved and updated demos and tests.*
• Page/Post Options
• Auto launch on page. If auto-launch is set Lightbox Plus will automatically open the first lightboxed item on the page.*
• Per page loading. Ff per page options are set Lightbox JavaScript will only load for specified pages.
• Blog/posts only loading. if per page options are set Lightbox JavaScript will only load for specified pages.
• Image grouping
• Added more control over image grouping
• Fixed image X of X problem, can disable Image X of X
• Scrolling If ‘false’ ColorBox will hide scrollbars for overflowing content. This could be used on conjunction with the resize method (see below) for a smoother transition if you are appending content to an already open instance of ColorBox.
• Updated ColorBox to verion 1.3.18
• Fixed a regression where Flash content displayed in ColorBox would be reloaded if the browser window was resized.
• Added safety check to make sure that ColorBox’s markup is only added to the DOM a single time, even if $.colorbox.init() is called multiple times. This will allow site owners to manually initialize ColorBox if they need it before the DOM has finished loading.
• Updated the example index.html files to be HTML5 compliant.
• Changed the slideshow behavior so that it immediately moves to the next slide when the slideshow is started.
• Minor regex bugfix to allow automatic detection of image URLs that include fragments.
• Numerous bug fixes
• Fixed use WP Caption option. Works with singles images and WordPress built in galleries now.
• Fixed text links getting lightboxed even of option is not set.
• Fixed many small issues and text errors.*

* Still in progress

Gravity Forms - WordPress Form Management

UPDATE: The issue issue fixed as of version 1.1.1 so I am removing my hotfix as it is no longer needed. Thank to Zack Katz creator of the Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-on for the quick fix.

I use Gravity Forms for a lot of things.  Recently I needed to integrate some forms with Salesforce the wildly popular CRM system.  At first I developed a more or less manual method to post the form information to Salesforce and redirect back to the confirmation page.  This was impractical in that every time one of the content contributors needed to create form that would post to Salesforce I had to manually build the redirect. By chance I was looking for something else in the WordPress plugin repository and ran across the Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-on.

This plugin is a free Salesforce Add-On for Gravity Forms that adds contacts directly into Salesforce, making lead generation even easier to use with WordPress.  The plugin advertised that it added one setting, a check a box when configuring your forms, and all of those form entries would be added to Salesforce.  There was only one problem.  Checkbox or no the plugin was posting every form to Salesforce, which meant that many forms that shouldn’t be posting contact information to Salesforce were doing so.

I contacted the developer to see if there was a solution but as of this post I have yet to hear back from him.  The plugin is really good on the Salesforce side of things and I couldn’t wait to hear back from the developer so I started looking through the code to see if I could solve the problem for myself.  After a bit of poking around I discovered that there was no check to see if the form had the Salesforce Integration checkbox selected or not.  A few lines of code later I had fixed the bug – or at least patched it to my satisfaction and the checkbox was working.  Only forms that have been designated to integrate with Salesforce were doing so.

I contacted the developer again with a list of the changes so that he will hopefully integrate them into the next release.  In the meantime if you are using the Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-On and you are having the same problem you can grab the hotfix below.

Roman Forum and Colosseum (credit: rmlowe)

I’m switching the forums back to bbPress now that there is a bbPress WordPress plugin for it.  I’m going to try to port all the messages back but there I’m not sure how that will work out.  So please be patient if you feel you need to post to the forums.  I had previously used bbPress but is seemed that no progress was being made regarding development so I switched to Mingle Forum.  Turns out bbPress was more useful – I was able to track topics better and respond better to posts. So that said I need to fix a few style issue and and try to port the posts back to bbPress and then the forums will be available once again.

UPDATE: In retrospect I’ve decided not to import the existing forum content for a couple of reasons.  One, I don’t have the time to do it.  And, two, I’d just like to start fresh with the forums and simplify them.

Glessner Covered Bridge, Somerset County, PA

I have a number of new features in the works for Lightbox Plus for WordPress and I thought I’d go ahead and mention some of them here now. I was hoping to release the version today or tomorrow but it looks like it’s probably going to be later in the week. In any event I have the following items planned.

Lightbox Positioning

An option to set fixed positioning that will keep the lightobox centered in the visitor’s viewport while scrolling the page.  Also the option to specify the horizontal and vertical position of the lightbox on the page.

Lightbox Plus Interface

Option to turn on or off grouping labels, and a fix for the grouping labels not always saving when changed.  Option to turn of scroll bars even if content overflows the lightbox.  And finally and option to open the lightbox immediately when a visitor lands on the page.

Inline Lightboxes

Ability to set additional option for them such as Overlay Opacity, Overlay Close, Transition Type and Resize Speed.

Lightbox Plus for WordPress Admin Interface

I intend to reorganize some of the elements of the WordPress admin interface to provide a more consistent experience for users and make it easier to find settings.

Lightbox Plus Demo. Railroad Crossing

Lightbox Plus 2.4 has been released. I have completely removed support for PHP 4 at this point. PHP 4 reached end of life as of August 8th 2008 and WordPress no longer supports it going forward. Do not upgrade if you are using PHP 4. I also added a small patch to the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser to check for the existence of the mbstring library which was causing issues for some folks. Milan Petrovic pointed out a minor bug that was causing syntax highlighter using Alex Gorbatchev JavaScript SyntaxHighlighter to not work. This was traced back to the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser stripping out return. Currently this is set to leave returns in but will be added as an option soon.

See the rest of the post for details.

• Removed all support for PHP 4.
• If you still need a version that works with PHP 4 DO NOT UPGRADE
• If you get this error: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_OBJECT_OPERATOR in /path/to/plugin/classes/filters.class.php on line 81 you have PHP 4.
• Contact your host provider to see if they can upgrade to PHP 5.
• Fixed issue where PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser was stripping returns causing issue with HTML output in several plugins (including SyntaxHighlighter Evolved)
• This issue should be fairly rare.
• Patched PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser (shd.class.php) to verify mb_detect_encoding() function exist before calling
• This issue was reported by several users that did not have mbstring functions compiled into PHP.
• Assumes UTF-8 if function doesn’t exist
• The correct solution is to add the mbstring library to PHP (contact you host/support to resolve)

You can get the latest download of Lightbox Plus at WordPress.org and 23systems or download Lightbox Plus 2.4.6 directly.

For support please submit a support request  though the support form.  For questions of comments please post a message in the Lightbox Plus forum on my site.

Lightbox Plus Demo. Corner Fire Hydrant

Lightbox Plus 2.3.1 has been released. This release includes an update of the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser from version 1.1 to version 1.5 which should correct some bugs and enhance functionality and speed. I also modified the way the jquery-colorbox.min.js script is en-queued to reduce the chance of conflict with other plugins and updated some styles that were out of date.

This was a quick release prior to the upcoming 2.4 release which will remove PHP 4 support completely.

• Changed wp_enqueue_script of jquery.colorbox-min.js to reduce chance of conflict with other implementations of ColorBox (should update for this reason)
• Updated PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser from version 1.1 to 1.5
• Memory leak fixed!
• Added support for detecting the source html character set. This is used to convert characters when plaintext is requested.
• Other little fixes and features, too numerous to categorize.
• Error of “file_get_contents()” will be thrown as an exception.
• Add flag: LOCK_EX while calling “file_put_contents()”.
• Fix the typo of “token_blank_t”.
• Supports xpath generated from Firebug.
• New method “dump” of “simple_html_dom_node”.
• New attribute “xmltext” of “simple_html_dom_node”.
• remove preg_quote on selector match function: [attribute*=value];
• Element “Comment” will treat as children.
• Fixed the problem with <pre>.
• Fixed bug #2207477 (does not load some pages properly).
• Fixed bug #2315853 (Error with character after < sign).
• Cleaned up some general code and updated some help in the admin panel
• Updated demos as some were no longer pointing to working links
• Fixed typos in this file
• Updated the following styles: Dark, Elegant, Framed, Lightweight, and Shadowed

You can get the latest download of Lightbox Plus at WordPress.org and 23systems or download Lightbox Plus 2.4.6 directly.

For support please submit a support request  though the support form.  For questions of comments please post a message in the Lightbox Plus forum on my site.

Fish Tale (Credit capn madd matt) (Lightbox Plus Demo)

After a long, long wait I have released Lightbox Plus to version 2.3. It should show up in updates pretty soon if not already. Unfortunately it’s a relatively minor update though it does add some additional functionality both on the WordPress side (up to 100 inline lightboxes are available) but also a variety of changes with ColorBox.

This update includes ColorBox version 1.3.17. I also fixed some minor internal bugs and some incorrect text. And finally I verified compatibility with WordPress 3.2.x.

• Tested with WordPress 3.2.x
• Minor bug fixes
• Some minor text fixes
• Added option to allow up to 100 inline lightboxes
• Updated ColorBox to version 1.3.17
• Added properties “top”, “bottom”, “left” and “right” to specify a position relative to the viewport, rather than using the default centering.
• Added property “data” to specify GET or POST data when using Ajax.  ColorBox’s ajax functionality is handled by jQuery’s .load() method, so the data property works the same way as it does with .load().
• Added property “fixed” which can provide fixed positioning for ColorBox, rather than absolute positioning.  This will allow ColorBox to remain in a fixed position within the visitors viewport, despite scrolling.  IE6 support for this was not added, it will continue to use the default absolute positioning.
• Fixed ClearType problem with IE7.
• Minor fixes.
• Updated ColorBox to verion 1.3.16
• Better IE related transparency workarounds.  IE7 and up now uses the same background image sprite as other browsers.
• Added error handling for broken image links. A message will be displayed telling the user that the image could not be loaded.
• Added new property: ‘fastIframe’ and set it to true by default.  Setting to fastIframe:false will delay the loading graphic removal and onComplete event until iframe has completely loaded.
• Ability to redefine $.colorbox.close (or prev, or next) at any time.

Please get the latest download of Lightbox Plus at WordPress.org and 23systems or download Lightbox Plus 2.4.6 directly.

If you need support please go to the Lightbox Plus message board.