Vacation

Posted on July 3, 2010 by Zachary Segal
So I'm currently on vacation in South East Asia for the summer. CataBlog won't be getting any updates until I return late August, sorry for any inconvience this causes. If you are interested please check out the travel blog at teamzauren.com. Cheers, Zach
Posted in Personal Notes | Leave a comment

WordPress Plugin Designs and Memory Leaks

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Zachary Segal

I recently discovered that CataBlog was using more and more of PHP's allocated memory. This meant that each page that was loaded while the CataBlog PHP Class (plugin) was activated it would use about 200k extra memory, continuously compounding on top of itself. Eventually WordPress would run out of available PHP memory and complain that it needed more.

I was able to isolate the procedure that was eating up so much memory and replace it with a more efficient one. This involved not loading in the WordPressDataBase class commonly known as the global $wpdb into CataBlog every time the class was instantiated. Instead the global version is now referenced in each of CataBlog's individual methods, I believe this is not an ideal solution, but the memory leak is now gone.

I apologize for any problems people are having with the plugin, but please do not delete your WordPress installation if any plugin breaks it. Instead you should have FTP access and simply go to your WordPress plugins folder wp-directory/wp-content/plugins/ and manually delete or move the folder named catablog. Thanks, and I hope that CataBlog's new features and future enhancements will encourage you to try it and hopefully it develops into a popular and full featured WordPress plugins.

Posted in Bug Fix, Development | 5 Comments

CataBlog 0.8.1 Released – Crucial Upgrade

Posted on May 23, 2010 by Zachary Segal

So I've updated CataBlog to version 0.8.1, this is a crucial upgrade because it fixes a memory leak which caused the plugin to take up more and more system memory over time. Everyone using CataBlog should upgrade to this latest release unless they want their blog to eventually run out of system memory.

The memory leak was due to the plugin's construct method, which copied the $wpdb object into the plugin class. Now CataBlog is using the global version of $wpdb in all methods which access the database. Is this something that could have been fixed with a destruct method? Instead of playing around with the code I decided the most pertinent thing would be to immediately fix the issue and offer an update to all users. Hope this fixes any issues you had with CataBlog, enjoy.

Zach

Posted in Software Update | Leave a comment

New Server

Posted on May 22, 2010 by Zachary Segal

So I have finally moved the site to my new VPS from a shared hosting firm whose name I will not mention. Needless to say the site should be much quicker now, I know I'm enjoying it. 🙂

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CataBlog 0.8 Released

Posted on May 14, 2010 by Zachary Segal

Well I released CataBlog version 0.8 today, it has been a lot of work getting to this point but I am finally starting to feel comfertable with the plugin. I have added many new features including some cool options for the automatic thumbnail generator and the ability to make your catalog a PayPal online store. This release's code has also been scrutinized more thoroughly and the interface debugged to a point that it should be usable on all major browsers. Please rate and confirm that this new release works at the WordPress Plugin Page.

WARNING:
 Keep in mind that anyone updating from a version prior to 0.7.5 will loose all their images and data, this is one of the hard realities of pre-release software, I hope I have not made anyone to mad.

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PayPal Shopping Cart Support

Posted on May 5, 2010 by Zachary Segal
So I am entertaining the idea of adding support for PayPal into CataBlog due to the needs of a client of mine. Basically I would let you add a price to a catalog item which would make an "Add to Cart" button appear under the description of the item. Still not sure how to deal with a view cart button, or if it's entirely necessary. Stay tuned and please add your own feelings below. Ciao.
Posted in New Features, Software Update | 14 Comments

Version 0.7.1 Broken

Posted on May 4, 2010 by Zachary Segal

It has recently come to my attention that version 0.7.1 might be broken. Apparently the image directories in the wp-content/upload directory are not being created upon installation. I am currently looking into this and will be releasing a fixed version soon. If anyone has any information or specific use cases as to when or ideas why this is happening it would be deeply appreciated if you could help shed some light on the issue. Thanks for your patience with this major bug, I really want to get a stable and usable version of the plug in up as soon as possible but my paying work must come first. No electricity no CataBlog, you feel me?

If you are getting an error saying that the uploaded file could not be saved make sure these two directories are in your WordPress uploads directory:
wp-content/uploads/catablog/originals/
wp-content/uploads/catablog/thumbnails/

Cheers,
Zach

Posted in Bug Fix | Leave a comment