Just thought I’d let everyone know what I’m up to with the plugin. If you’d like to see my current wish-list of features, skim through the couple of comments on my last post. Here’s the latest, in relative order of importance:
SPAM Received / Purge Dates
DONE! These are now displayed in my admin panel. Oddly enough, most of the data for this was already present in the plugin code, just not actually printed out… go figure. You can expect this to appear in the next release!
Email Notifications
I just migrated the function used to send email notifications about new comments over to the Akismet plugin today. I haven’t actually tested it yet, because I’m waiting on several other things so I can test it all as a whole.
I’ve also added an “Additional Configuration” section to the Akismet configuration panel (Plugins -> Akismet Configuration, where you put your API key in). Right now it’s got a “Notify on New SPAM” checkbox you can tick if you want our new notifications. You can expect this to grow somewhat significantly as I add more and more options.
Whitelists & Blacklists
The next priority is a whitelist and blacklist feature. Wordpress already includes blacklisting, but I really want a more specific tool. I want to be able to specify that this email address or this IP address is blocked, or that this word is a no-no. Wordpress lumps all these together, which could leave room for a lot of false-positives.
Blacklisting will have to come right along with the email notifications, otherwise there’s no way for me to test in a timely manner (ie: I’ll have to add myself to the blacklist so I can SPAM as much as needed). Since whitelisting is exactly the opposite, it’s just natural that the two should come as a package.
Admin Panel Coolness
Just because it’s all the rage these days, I thought I’d add a little Ajax to the admin panel. Why type all this whitelist / blacklist stuff in one big text box when you can use Ajax to add / remove multiple ones? Gee, aren’t I the greatest?
So that’s where we’re at. The next release should be fairly soon. By the end of the weekend, if nothing else. I’ve gotta make it to Starbucks for some quality coding time before Thanksgiving hits and exams quickly follow, or it may be Christmas before I get much more done.
As always, if you’ve got any problems or feature requests, drop me an email, use the form on the Contact Info page, or let it fly in a comment!
5 Comments so far
Abdul Mueid, on November 19, 2005 at 6:32am, said:
Upcoming changes sound too good. The Ajaxification in the Admin panel would be great. Keep it coming,
Feature request: A block of info in the Dashboard showing how many spam comments are present in Akismet. I’m too lazy to go to Manage->Akismat :P (So code changes on my side would be fine)
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Chris Meller, on November 19, 2005 at 11:29am, said:
UPDATE: Fixed the broken code sections…
Well, you’re probably not going to believe it, but code to do exactly that is already in the original plugin:
add_action('activity_box_end', 'akismet_stats');Apparently “activity_box_end” isn’t a valid plugin hook… yet. I imagine it would probably work if you’re using 1.6.
As a work-around, I may add an option to move the Manage->Akismet menu to a top-level menu, so you can always see the “Akismet (#)” panel in the main Admin menu bar. Not the most elegent solution, but it’d work…
Also as an option, you could edit your
wp-admin/index.phpfile right now to add this new trigger.In it, on about line 106, you should see:
<h2><?php _e('Dashboard'); ?></h2>Two lines above that, you should see a
</div>. Before that</div>tag (which closes our “Latest Activity” box), enter:<?php do_action('activity_box_end', ''); ?>Ta-da! Your Akismet Stats should automagically appear!
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Abdul Mueid, on November 19, 2005 at 12:18pm, said:
Bingo!!! Got it to apperar on the dashboard.
thanks alot dude.
Rock on…
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Chris Meller, on November 19, 2005 at 12:25pm, said:
The particularly odd thing is… I just downloaded what is supposedly Wordpress 2.0 beta 1 and that code is still missing… I don’t know where Matt Mullenweg was getting that from when he wrote the plugin. It’s not like he should know what hooks existing in his own software… ;)
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Abdul Mueid, on November 19, 2005 at 12:31pm, said:
I also saw the Wordpress 2.0 Beta 1 via mailing list, infact I have it set up on my wordpress test station at http://wp-teststation.be
It is much more stable than the 1.6 nightlies that I tried earlier. I guess it just needs some more work.
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