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(Having been written on April first, this is, of course, a joke. I was hoping for something more than one weird pingback. No one loves me… Well, okay, Mr. Biech loves me.)

I have just released Cricket Moods version seven point oh! I think you’ll enjoy the changes I’ve made in this version:

• The main portion of the plugin is now developed in Visual Basic .NET.
• Smilies are now required to be flash animations, allowing for a greater degree of flexibility and “wow! factor.”
• Interfaces with a database of moods contributed by thousands of users across the globe.
• Smilies can now be uploaded directly from your browser (requires Internet Explorer 7 and installation of ad-supported browser toolbar; Firefox, Safari, Opera support soon!).

In order to maintain a higher quality product, Cricket Moods is now a closed-source commercially supported plugin. A license key is now required in order to use the plugin. Personal licenses can be purchased for as low as five US Dollars. Thanks for your support!

Cricket Moods 3.5 is an update to fix a rather serious issue when used with WordPress 2.1.x (it may also affect WordPress 2.0.x, not sure). Submission of a comment to a post will cause that post’s moods to disappear. This was caused by changes in the WordPress codebase that I did not anticipate. The full changelog:

• Removed redundant cm_update_post_moods action hook (this may make it incompatible with WP < 2.1.2).
• Added sanity check to make sure that moods were supposed to be POSTed before trying to act on those moods (thanks Jana! <jana AT janasjibberish DOT c o m>).
• Sanitized the output of the Image Directory on the options panel.

I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly test with WordPress 2.0.x, so those users should tread lightly. I’d appreciate it if anyone could test that for me.

I have recently updated Cricket Moods to allow the plugin to be translated into other languages. I would be absolutely ecstatic if anyone wanted to attempt such a translation.

If you’re not sure where to start, the WordPress Codex has a decent article on the process. The translation template (POT) file for Cricket Moods can be found in the wp-plugins.org subversion repository.

I won’t officially release the new localizable version of Cricket Moods until I have at least one complete translation, since it would be pointless to otherwise. It is, however, available on the subversion trunk if you’d like to have it.

Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

This release will hopefully fix any remaining issues people might still be having with their mood lists. Changes follow:

• Dirty fix for people still having issues (maybe?).
• Added buttons to reset both personal and the global mood lists.
• Added buttons to strip moods from per-user and all-user posts.
• Added an option to specify whether the moods should be placed above or below the content.

If you’re still having problems with the issues I’ve mentioned previously, chances are your personal list of moods is gone/hosed/kaput. I don’t know how it may have happened since I haven’t been able to reproduce the disappearing moods behavior myself. The best thing for you to do would be to reset your personal list of moods using the newly added button on the bottom of the Manage » Moods panel.

I have braved the horrors of an old laptop and a slow dial-up connection to bring you Cricket Moods 3.2—Now free from the aforementioned usermeta bug.

Happy Holidays!

It has come to my attention that there is an issue with the Cricket Moods WordPress plugin. The issue appears to be that when you edit your personal list of moods you receive something similar to the following error:

Warning: ksort() expects parameter 1 to be array, string given in
/wp-content/plugins/cricket-moods.php on line 615

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in
/wp-content/plugins/cricket-moods.php on line 616

I have received about five or six e-mails from individuals having this issue, and I can only assume it’s related to some change I overlooked in the relatively recent 2.0.5 release of WordPress. I apologize if you haven’t heard a response from me about the plugin. Rest assured, I’m not ignoring you! I have recently just moved and am now on vacation out-of-state. I will be back to my workstation in a week or two and will be able to dedicate some time to this issue then.

Keep in mind that the plugin is Open Source Software. If anyone feels like investigating this on their own, I’d be more than happy to accept your patch and release a new version immediately giving you full credit.

I just posted a new version of Cricket Moods. This release is a maintenance release with one bug fixed. The plugin will now automatically work out of the box if the WordPress install is located in a subdirectory of the root domain.

If you just installed Cricket Moods and can’t see any of the wonderful similies or are getting an error like the following (emphasis added):

Warning: dir(/home/example/public_html/wp-includes/images/smilies/): failed to open dir: No such file or directory in /home/example/public_html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/cricket-moods.php on line 579

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /home/example/public_html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/cricket-moods.php on line 580

you must change your “Mood image directory” option to reflect the location of your blog. In this case the user would change it to /wordpress/wp-includes/images/smilies.

It will not be necessary to change this option with new Cricket Moods 3.1 installs. If you are updating from 3.0 or are still using 3.0, then you will have to change your “Mood image directory” option.

I have just officially released Cricket Moods 3.0. Major improvements include multi-user support and error reporting. The plugin also has several important bugfixes, one of which lets it play more nicely with other metadata-based plugins.

In the process of fixing bugs, I believe I noticed a bug within WordPress itself. One of the new functions in WordPress 2.0, update_usermeta(), doesn’t escape any data before trying to cram it into the database. If the data isn’t escaped, then things fall apart when it contains an apostrophe. If a plugin is poorly written, I think a malicious user could theoretically modify data he shouldn’t have access to—however, I don’t have any testcases to back up my claim. I’ve already created a ticket in WordPress Trac if you’d like to follow along.