Steve's Ramblings

When I started the fork of Robert Tsai’s Wordbook plugin, which I rebranded as Wordbooker, I was pushing out version after version very quickly: Version 1.0 came out on 02/01/2010 and I was up to Version 1.5 by 10/01/2010.

Things have slowed down a bit now, and Version 1.6 was released on 22/01/2010 with 1.6.1 (which allowed posting to Fan Page Walls) coming out on 29/01/2010.

Version 1.7 is still being worked on – and I’m up to Beta 7, and about to push Beta 8 out later today which fixes some minor annoyance.

These Betas have been a mix of code fixes, code enhancements to work round various WordPress plugins, and fixes to HTML to get things working across the user “landscape”.

I do all my development on a Medion  S5610 Laptop running Ubuntu 9.10. So I’ve got Firefox 3.6, Opera 10.10, Chromium 5.0.336.0 (39849) and Chrome installed as browsers. If I reboot into Windows then I can test on Firefox 3.6 , Opera 10, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer 8. That still leaves the Mac platform as a complete blank space where I can’t test, plus any other versions of Internet Explorer.

It wouldn’t be bad if all the browsers behaved the same but they don’t. Chrome for example craps out if you forget to close label tags – its obviously something to do with nesting that eventually blows something up, but I don’t know what it is.

Internet Explorer 8′s implementation of Javascript blows up on some drag and drop functionality provided by WordPress for its widget management page. No other browser seems to be quite so anal about null objects as IE is for some reason, and I’ve just spent an hour or so debugging it, and it was down to not including an object class inside a php text call (No don’t ask.. I don’t know why either)

So that’s why I’ve been pushing out Betas because I can’t test every single combination of operating system/browser/Wordpress version/active WordPress plugins.

Of course it doesn’t help that Facebook doesn’t always play ball properly – I spent about 2 hours chasing an image posting problem just to find that it was Facebook acting up.

Now all I’ve got to do is get people to use the beta versions and give me feedback on bugs…. that makes my part of the job look easy!