January 16
Advanced Excerpt 0.2.1 released
The previous version of the Advanced Excerpt plugin has lasted a long time, but its increasing popularity and several feature requests have finally resulted in a new version.
What new features are included?
Well, most importantly, multi-byte character support. The plugin has received a lot of attention on the Asian side of the world (judging from the pingbacks), but unfortunately it fails with Chinese, Japanese and a whole host of other character sets. Betty was the first to report this problem and kindly helped me solve it. The plugin now supports multi-byte character sets.
I should point out, though, that it will only work when the mbstring PHP extension is enabled on the host. Furthermore, using UTF-8 on your blog is the safest way to make everything work.
People who don’t have the mbstring extension need not worry, the plugin will continue to work but with multi-byte character support disabled.
Another effort to internationalise the plugin includes the support for translations. The plugin now comes with a language file that can be used for translation. The only languages that are currently available are English and Dutch, but additional translations can be made using the PO file. If you want to translate, but don’t know how: stay tuned, there will be a post on that shortly.
Many people have been complaining about the problematic implementation of the Advanced Excerpt plugin in templates (using $advancedexcerpt->filter()). Admittedly, this was a confusing method and besides, the plugin FAQ was slightly incorrect. Sorry to all users who have been trying to get this work for so long.
This problem should be solved with the new release, which introduces the_advanced_excerpt() function. Using advanced excerpts in your template is now as easy as using any of WordPress’ default template tags. Usage details can be found in the plugin FAQ.
One final new addition to the feature set is the ability to ignore custom excerpts (you know, the ones you can write manually for every post you publish). The default behaviour is to always use custom excerpts, but for some reason a blogger might change his mind. One setting changes the behaviour.
Other updates include consistency of the options page with the rest of the new WordPress 2.7 admin interface as well as a compatibility check (which was by far the least work).
So, go ahead and update the plugin and enjoy the new features! Also, feel free to inform me of problems or features you would like to see in a next version in the comments section.
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