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November ’09 Newsletter

Once again we have reached the end of November and it’s time to put out the newsletter.

Finally we have caught up with the backlog and I’m happy to announce that all our products are now compliant with WordPress 2.8.6. As our regular readers will remember in many of the apps the problems were caused by some major changes that were made to the core of WordPress when version 2.8 was released. It has taken a lot of hard work on the part of the Tribulant team to catch up with these changes. Thankfully, this is now done and we can now concentrate on further development and improvement to our products. The last of our products to be upgraded to WordPress 2.8 was Custom Fields.

By the looks of it, WordPress 2.9 doesn’t seem to pose too many major threats and moving over to WordPress 2.9 with our plugins shouldn’t be a problem but please wait for an announcement from us as a green flag.

Custom Fields v1.2

Besides the WordPress Custom Fields plugin now being compatible with WordPress 2.8.6, one of the additions to the new release is that the fields are now dynamic and they are saved in the administration panel. You can create unlimited, unique custom fields, each of a different field type. Field types include text fields, textareas, checkboxes, radio buttons, select drop downs and additional, pre-defined fields such as a country drop down, file upload field and date picker.

This latest change gives the user the ability to create custom fields and to reuse them throughout the user forms, such as the registration, profile pages etc. Keep an eye out for future releases which will allow you to put additional fields into the current WordPress comments form.

Feedback and the Ticket System

Feedback continues to be positive and as mentioned last month this has largely been due to the implementation of the support ticket system. There will be a slight change to the way tickets will be handled from now on.

Generally we sent out an automated reply to a ticket when a ticket was assigned to Antonie, stating that a technical ticket had been assigned to him and that it would be attended to. While this proved effective in letting you, the client, know that the ticket was being attended to this method of handling tickets caused somewhat of a problem in the support system itself. The system marked the ticket as answered and therefore gave us a false indication of which the goods were actually still outstanding. We will no longer be sending out this automated response but would like to assure customers that the tickets are still being handled regularly on a day-to-day basis.

News and Updates

Are you subscribed to our News blog for updates? If not, please subscribe via email (to the specific mailing lists you wish to receive news from) or RSS at https://blog.tribulant.com in order to receive notifications of new updates and other product related news. Alternatively, follow us on Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/tribulant/

If you are a customer of Tribulant Software and you use one or more of our products, it is important that you subscribe either to the mailing list(s), RSS feed or our Twitter account since WordPress.org doesn’t support non-GPL (commercial) based plugins for automatic update notifications in the WordPress ‘Plugins’ panel. All releases are announced via the news blog!

Upcoming

Besides getting on with adding features to our products and improving them one of the things that we will be working on during December is to design a new look and feel for our website, blog, newsletter, demonstration sites and documentation site. We hope to make the new design a lot more user-friendly and appealing to first time visitors. We hope to have the new site ready for release at the beginning of January 2010.

When to upgrade your WordPress

At the risk of being repetitive and for those of you who may have missed last month’s newsletter, please read the October ’09 Newsletter to see I wrote concerning the release of WordPress 2.9.

I cannot stress how important it is to ensure that you test to your site in a development directory if necessary before you upgrade your WordPress or any other plug-in for that matter. A large number of queries that we deal with are a result of incompatibility with either the WordPress version being used or a third-party plug-in. For many of our customers they ran a commercial site and it should be a “Golden Rule” that they test any changes or additions/deletions on a test site that is not running live before they implement such changes into their love site. This is simply good website practice.

Documentation

During October progress was made on making most of the documentation in uniform. While I know that some users would like to see more detail in the documentation, this is an area that we will continue to work on and improve. Unfortunately documentation is never complete and it is always an ongoing process as our products grow and develop and change from version to version. Unfortunately for the moment we do not have someone solely dedicated to writing documentation for the products. If there are any readers out there who feel they may enjoy the task of working solely with the documentation and keeping an up-to-date, please contact us.

Translation

As some of you may have noticed we are slowly but surely introducing the option into each of our products to make it multilingual. Once again this is a slow process and what we really need is folk to upgrade to help and you have the ability to translate the command menus and prompts into the different languages.

So far we have managed to get help with Spanish that are keen to make contact with those of you who may be able to assist in the other languages such as French, German, Dutch, Italian, Russian, etc.

We are more than willing to compensate translators for their time. You don’t have to be a professional translator, just contact us and tell us what you are capable of.

Articles and Snippets

As a reminder we to invite you to send in articles of interest, comments etc and feedback. This will be like a ‘Readers Column’.

If you have any News press release or for those of you who are interested in writing an article please feel free to submit it for consideration in the next  newsletter.  Topics may be varied at this stage as this is a pilot project. All we ask is that the articles are related in some way to you business, field of interest or expertise and are non-political, may be considered of general interest and are suitably tasteful.

You can build some PR for your own site by linking back to it from us! For those interested, submit a ticket.

The Wrap up

Well it for now. All that remains is to everyone a festive and enjoyable period during the upcoming holiday season. For those of you running online stores may your sales be plentiful and for those of you gain away sure that you all deserve a well earned rest. We wish you a great Deecember. Be safe and be well.