A quick update has been released that fixes this. The new safe release is now 0.2.2, which should be available from the WordPress plugin repository shortly.

The cause for this problem is the fact that PHP 4 can have mbstring enabled, but not support all its functions. Ironically.

By the way, this would be a good time to urge your host to update PHP. The version 4 releases are all historical now.

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.

But don’t worry, the good news is that the new verification method doesn’t conflict with your webhost’s protection techniques!

To everybody who uses this plugin: it will not work in WP 2.5. If it worked for you in previous version, then you will likely not need it in WP 2.5.

The solution I offered solves the problem in most cases, but it wasn’t really good. Main reason: I provided a patch for a pluggable function! Secondly, the solution was less secure than the original.

However, I have returned to this issue to come up with a better solution. Behold, a plugin to fix the problem! No need to modify any WordPress files, just upload the plugin and activate it.

I have also improved the fix: it is now just as secure as the original one. You should check out the code if you want to know why.

It’s called “Advanced Excerpt” and basically it just improves the way excerpts are created. By default, if a post has no explicit excerpt, WordPress creates one by grabbing the post content, stripping all the tags, shortening it to a (hard-coded) length and adding an ellipsis (which is, by the way, also hard-coded). The result: a dull excerpt.

This plugin changes that. The most notable feature is that it keeps your HTML. Furthermore, it allows you to choose the length of the excerpt (using either words or characters) and which character(s) is/are used as an ellipsis. You can even choose which HTML tags are stripped and which are not! It is very useful if your WordPress theme uses excerpts at prominent places (like mine).

There is another plugin that attempts to improve excerpt creation, but I tried it and it just doesn’t work properly (in fact, it inspired me to write a better one). One major problem is that it breaks your HTML. My plugin solves this by counting only the words or characters that are not part of an HTML tag and by properly closing tags that are left open.

If you want to see it in action, just look at my front page, a category or try a search. Of course, you can also download it yourself.

You’ll notice that there is a lot of tweaking to be done on the theme, but that’s why you are testing the theme in the first place. However, even after testing it on a local installation of Wordpress, you may discover a few flaws after launching the theme. Apparently, the testing wasn’t thorough enough.

Luckily, we can add dummy content to our (local) Wordpress installation with only a few clicks. You do need a useful data dump from another blog, though. I have found a dump of the dummy content used for the sndbx theme contest, together with some instructions on how to use it. The good thing about it is that it contains a wide variety of content. Not only a lot of common (and less common) HTML elements, but also different types of comments (pingbacks, trackbacks), content (pages, paged posts) and large images that can fubar your layout if you don’t deal with them.

I suppose that if your theme works with this on your local server, it will probably stand a good chance on the ‘Interweb.’ Or can you name a better source for dummy content?

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