Version 2.3 of the Semiologic Pinnacle theme has been released.    The release fixes Page Specific Headers that got broken along the way with Pinnacle.   There are a few css tweaks for mobile usage, especially around page numbering being too close together and getting flagged by Google as not mobile ready.

Full change log includes:

•  Add default proportional sizing to entry_content images for handheld and tablets.
• Add class to page number navigation and style for mobile compliance
• Created template-starter file
• Ensure active_layout if set in the header and footer php files, when used with a template
• Break index.php into standard get_header, get_footer, get_sidebar calls to support templating better
• Added visibility classes for desktop, tablet, mobile and extra-wide (> 1200px) devices
• Fix broken page specific headers functionality
• Removed bullet.gif list-item image and use standard disc as default
• Add support for wide themes (> 1200px). Alter media breakpoints for mobile landscape
• Missed the responsive css rules for the new column classes.

Semiologic

Version 6.0 of the External Links WordPress plugin has been released.   The biggest reason to upgrade is performance.    The version 5.x releases had a lot to be desired and added a drain to site loaded.   I'm embarrassed about it.  Thanks to David and Alex for pointing this out on the External Links wordpress.org plugin area.   Good news is that things are much, much quicker now.   (Note that the Auto-Thickbox plugin used the link parsing logic and suffered poorer performance than necessary.  It has been upgraded as well).

This version introduces an option to define if subdomains (sub.example.com) are treated as a local link to the site (assuming the plugin is installed on example.com).    Also, there were a pair of complementary plugins, Autolink URI and Dofollow, that have now been merged into this plugin.  Those plugins are now deprecated.

Semiologic

A new version of the Semiologic SEO plugin has just been released.   The main driver for the release was fixing a bug introduced in version 2.5 that prevented you from saving your Google Publisher url in the settings screen.   Obviously that needed to be fixed.   While in there I went ahead and added meta robots directives that will prevent Google, Bing and others from keeping indexing the extraneous WordPress Archive type pages and out of the search result listings.

Hence the WordPress Archive and Special pages will now have the following meta robots directives:

• Date archives – noindex, follow
• Author archives -  noindex, follow
• Tag archives  -  noindex, follow
• Category archives -  index, follow (actually the meta robots line is simply not present in the html output)
• Search results pages -  noindex, follow
• 404 pages -  noindex, follow

Full 2.6 changelog:

• Archive type pages – author, date, tags and search and 404 pages are now set to 'noindex, follow' to removing indexing of these pages.  Category pages will continued to be indexed.
• Tweak the Page and Post Title & Meta box.
  • Moved up higher on page editor.
  • Clarified purpose by changing to SEO Title & Meta
  • Removed incorrectly displayed 'Home' from field labels
• Make sure field input is properly sanitized.
• Fixed: Google Publisher entry was not being saved after change made in 2.5.

Note in version 2.5,  the entry of the home page Google Authorship capability was removed as Google simply stated, "don't do that!"  Your individual google+ profile should only be linked to single blog posts, pages and author pages.

Semiologic

Version 3.0 of Auto Thickbox is a major release of the plugin.  It offers new keyboard support, improved text captions,support for bmp file types, and WP 3.9 compatibility.

Keyboard support now offered with this release:

• Next Image: Greater Than (>) or Left Arrow
• Previous Image: Less Than (<) or Right Arrow
• First Image: Home
• Last Image: End
• Close Popup: Esc or Enter/Return

The changelog for this release includes:

• Added new keyboard support: Left arrow, right arrow, home, end
• Next and Prev don't always advance correctly with Thickbox.js 3.1. Plugin now has own custom thickbox.js.
• WP 3.9 eliminated some of the default thickbox styling. Plugin now has own custom thickbox styling
• Changed ordering of Prev, Next and Image of
• Photo title is now centered.
• Now support .bmp image extensions
• Custom thickbox.js uses a minified version for better performance.
• WP 3.9 compat
• Code refactoring

Semiologic

Version 2.6 of the Semiologic Cache has been released.    The new release new features as well as a few bug fixes:

• Added ability to manually disable caching for a page.
• Pages that include the Semiologic Contact Form widget are no longer cached. Caching conflicted with spam prevention techniques and was resulting in occasional false positives.
• Fix invalid operation warning message in the cache-fs.php file
• Updated htaccess caching rules

Manual Disabling of Page Cache

The new release adds the ability to manually exclude a page from the static cache.   It supports 2 detection methods to not cache a page.

1) If the text 'sem_do_not_cache' is found anywhere on the page, the plugin simple ignores generating a static version of the page.

If you're using the Semiologic Script Manager plugin, you can add

<!–sem_do_not_cache–>

to the header area when editing the page. Alternatively you can drop the <!–sem_do_not_cache–> into the HTML tab or a page to add to the page content. The tag be hidden in the page content.

OR

2) If the PHP constant DONOTCACHEPAGE is set to 'true', caching of the page is ignored.

define( 'DONOTCACHEPAGE', true );

Note: Asset caching (css and js) still occurs. This flag only effects static page caching.

Semiologic

I've gone ahead and released  the 14 free WordPress plugins compatible with WordPress 3.8.   These plugins are hosted both here on the Semiologic site in the Software area, as well as, on the WordPress Plugin Directory.

The released 14 plugins:

• Admin Menu
• Author Image
• Auto Thickbox
• Autolink URI
• Bookmark Me
• Do Follow
• External Links
• Fancy Excerpt
• Frame Buster
• Opt-In Front Page
• Subscribe Me
• Unfancy Quote
• Uploads Folder
• XML Sitemaps

The remaining Semiologic plugins and theme will be released over the next few days.   Please follow this blog for future announcements.

Mike

Semiologic

Version 2.3 of Semiologic Fixes is needed to run Semiologic on WordPress 3.7/3.8.    One of the features of this plugin is that is automatically configured the TinyMCE editor toolbar with additional commonly used buttons.   In doing this additional TinyMCE  plugins were bundled with the sem-fixes plugin.   Problem is that new major/minor releases of TinyMCE often required the need to upgrade the included plugins and provide different versions depending on what version of WordPress you were using.   Let's just say this is a pain.   So going forward I'm dropping the TinyMCE functionality and instead will rely on/recommend the TinyMCE Advanced plugin.    Semiologic Fixes will initialize the TinyMCE plugin for you.  After that you're free to alter as you see fit.

This version of Semiologic Fixes also includes:

• Added custom wp_redirect function to better handle browser 301 caching glitches.
• Disable automatic WordPress updating (sets AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED to 'true').
• Added back some post/page revision limiting.  If you do not specifically set the WP_POST_REVISIONS constant in your wp-config.php file, revisions will now be limited to 5 revisions deep.   If you do not wish to have any revisions set WP_POST_REVISIONS to false.  If you want unlimited revisions then set WP_POST_REVISIONS to true.  You can also specify your own number .  See Revisions in the WordPress Codex for more information.

And yes as you see from the list above I have disabled automatic updating of WordPress.    Having WordPress simply upgrade itself outside of the release cycles of themes and plugins just isn't a good idea.   A debate for another time.    If you would like to reenable upgrading set AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED to 'false' in wp-config.php and then plugin will respect your wishes.

Semiologic

Version 4.4 of the Author Image plugin has been released.   This version adds width and a height options to the Author Image widget so you can override the size of the actual image file.

For those not using the widget and adding the image directly to their WordPress theme template files, a new function call has been added allowing a size to be specified.

<?php the_author_image_size($  width, $  height, $  author_id = null); ?>

Note: The $ author_id parameter is optional. If it is not passed in, the code will attempt to get the current author of the page/post.

Thanks to Eric for the inspiration for this enhancement.

Semiologic

Version 2.4 of the [Semiologic Cache Plugin->@software] for WordPress has been released.  WordPress sites running the Semiologic Cache plugin experience vastly improved site performance and this release improves upon that.

This version features enhanced Apache htaccess rules for better performance and overall user and browser experience.   Additionally, the correct canonical url is now enforced when caching is enabled if the incorrect www or non-www version of the site's url is used to visit the site.

Upon upgrading the plugin you will need to turn the cache off (Settings->Cache) then back on to force the new server rules to be written.

Semiologic

Version 4.3 of the External Links  WordPress plugin has been released.   This version has been tested with WordPress 3.6 and adds compatibility with PHP 5.4.  This version also fixes a few bugs reported through the Auto Thickbox support forum on wordpress.org.

Fixes include:

• Issue with parsing of links with non-standard (class, href, rel, target) attributes included in the <a> tag. This caused Twitter Widgets to break.
• Issue where the external link icon was not added if the url specified by href had a preceding space href=" http://www.example.com"
• Issue with links containing onClick (or other javascript event) attributes with embedded javascript code. WordPress' Threaded Comments does this.
• Issue with 2 spaces being injected between <a and class/href/rel/etc. i.e <a href="http://example.com">
• 'Warning: ob_start(): non-static method anchor_utils::ob_filter() should not be called statically' warning when using PHP 5.4 or 5.3 with warning logging enabled.

Auto Thickbox was also impacted by several of these issues.  Auto Thickbox version 4.2 includes the necessary fixes.

Semiologic