macguru2000

Hi kristel_ttm,

I’m looking to release a bug/patch release very soon with a few fixed bugs. I would love to fix these bugs as well, here is what my thought are as of now.

– Enable WordPress Filters
this feature was always a little scary for me, especially since someone could put [catablog] into a catalog item description and basically create an infinite loop. My guess is that a built in WordPress filter, wpautop, starting being applied to your catalog descriptions. This could be from the 3.1 upgrade or something else, possible theme code changes or even CataBlog code changes. I will look into it more.

– Multiple Buy Now Buttons
Haven’t heard or seen this one yet, but will look into it. I kind of have the feeling a lot of people aren’t using the shopping cart feature so it doesn’t get as well tested. My only question for you is, when you say without a price, you mean a price of zero, right? I believe that at this point CataBlog requires that the price be a positive number. Decimal points might be messing this up too…..

If you could let me know what you catalog item prices are asap that would be awesome. Thanks and look for CataBlog 1.2.1 release soon with a couple good bug fixes.

Hi inzubi,

I am 100% in accord with your desire to have Gettext translating strings in the plugin. I am thinking that the next point release, 1.3, will be trying to make CataBlog ready for internationalization.

Also, thanks for the link, I really appreciate it when people give me links to relevant articles. It helps me understand exactly what you want.

Thank you so much for your interest and If you haven’t had a chance please rate and confirm CataBlog works with your version of WordPress at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/catablog/

TimM01,

I believe what you want to do is possible, but I have never done it. What you will most likely want to do is call CataBlog directly in your template code. You can fetch the page’s category from the WordPress query and then pass it into CataBlog. As long as the category names match it should work. That being said there are some issues to be aware of, especially with the current CataBlog release.

As of CataBlog 1.1 there is a bug. When one makes a CataBlog category with the same name as a Post category a new unique category doesn’t actually get created. Even if names match, a category must have a unique slug across all taxonomies in the system. If two categories share the same slug it is very bad. I am releasing CataBlog 1.2 later today and I would recommend upgrading to it. The new version will not only append a string to each CataBlog category slug, thus making it unique in the system, it also double checks the database to make sure it does actually create a new and unique category. When people upgrade to version 1.2 I will recommend that they do an export, verify the data manually and then reimport there data to update their category data.

You could easily recreate and add a prefix to each of your CataBlog categories, thus separating them manually. Either way you can call this PHP method from within your WordPress Theme code once you are sure your categories aren’t colliding.

<?php catablog_show_items($category) ?>

Just pass in a string for the category that is the category name, note that this name is case sensitive, so please make sure that all the capitalization matches as well. Good luck and let me know if you need anymore help or if you get it working.

– Zach

Hi papafrankc

So I tried to reproduce the error you are getting and could not, these are the steps that I tried.

00. Fresh WordPress Install with the standard theme unit test data loaded.
01. Create new category in the standard post categories named 'Candle Holders'.
02. Install CataBlog 1.1
03. Import a test CSV file for items and add matching images to catablog uploads folder
04. Regenerate all images
05. Create new CataBlog category named 'Candle Holders' and add an item to it, this category is corrupt.
06. Check that the admin list filter works for new 'Candle Holders' category.
07. Check that the filter works with the CataBlog ShortCode.
08. Deactivate CataBlog plugin
09. Replace catablog in plugins folder with version 1.1.9
10. Activate CataBlog
11. Check that the admin list filter works for 'Candle Holders' category.
12. Check that the filter works with the CataBlog ShortCode.

When I do these steps everything works as expected. Even though CataBlog 1.1 created a corrupted category, 1.1.9 is able to use it. I consider the category corrupted because one term has been placed into two taxonomies. This is bad. I am unsure if you have categories with matching names in both your standard post taxonomy and your CataBlog taxonomy. If you do then most likely these categories are corrupted and you should do an export of your catalog and then reimport your catalog. This action should not replace or touch any of your image files and will only replace the CataBlog rows in your database. This action will also clear all corrupted categories and recreate new categories with proper unique slugs. If you could try this on your test server that would be really really awesome. Thanks again

You should probably be disabling the plugin before overwriting it and then re enabling the plugin after you overwrite it. Did you also try the filters in the Admin section, on the main CataBlog list page you may filter your catalog with a drop down menu, I assume that does not work either? Thanks for testing for me.

Thank you for your input regarding CataBlog. I appreciate the time and effort everyone takes to help make CataBlog a better plugin. It would seem you had two problems to report.

1. If the category name is just the right length then you can’t delete it.
2. Catalog list in Admin takes too long to render 700 items

Now I haven’t had a chance to fix the category name blocking the delete link issue since I have been concentrating on other features and bugs. A fix most likely will be integrated into the upcoming 1.2 version release, since it should be relatively easy to fix.

As far as the version 1.1.7 being much slower then version 1.1 at displaying 700 catalog items, I am not surprised. 1.1.7 was a beta release and low and behold had some pretty nasty bugs. One such bug was that WordPress was individually fetching each item’s categories, making a list of 700 items require over 700 database queries. Very very bad, got that one fixed in 1.1.8 which was just released.

In an effort to make the Admin catalog list load faster I also incorporated some JavaScript to lazy load the thumbnail images. Instead of loading all images when the page is loaded it only loads the images that are visible. This script was doing a lot of calculation when you scrolled the browser window, I fixed this by caching the list of images to lazy load into one array and manipulating that array directly. This dramatically reduced the amount of memory the page required and made scrolling seem smoother to me.

All in all, if you are adventurous, I would look into possibly installing CataBlog 1.1.8, otherwise wait for the upcoming new stable release.