Just have released a new development version for the User Community Plugin. Now with some finished features. With this, we are more near to get to the first milestone and to close an stable release. This probably will be 0.5 and at that point, all previous development releases will be deleted.

By now, you have this features working:

• Changing the picture in login page. You can have a new logo and you can upload it from the admin panel.
• User profiles: list and pages. Have a paged users list and a profile page for each user, with picture and other profile information. You have some settings available to choose the list order, addresses to show or hide, customize the IM addresses and more.
• User Photo Galleries now available. Users can upload multiple images to their profile, and choose which one to show in the profile page and which one use as avatar. This can be changed any time. In the settings page,  yo set the maximum picture sizes, the max number of pictures a user can upload and some more.
• Can choose to use local avatars or those from Gravatar (default in WP). Also can set to check at Gravatar only if a local avatar is not available.
• Administrators can fully manage user galleries.

What need to be done for this milestone:

• User gallery is set, but no way to show a full gallery. Also a picture preview in the Gallery manager is missing.
• Have to provide some template functions, specially to integrate with author pages.
• Set some sort of picture effects like LightBox or ThicBox.
• Need some code cleaning and more, more, testing.
• Avatars for bbPress is not running now, this bbPress plugin must be finished.

In this version there are some small changes, ones related to Inline Tags and others to the Functions for Theme Developers.

Changes for Inline Tags

Now, the tag [pagelist] allows to set a custom title. With this change, all inline tags have the same behavior.

Changes for Theme Functions

A new generic function ipagelist() has been added to be used on templates. This function takes all plugin parameters from the post or page Custom Fields. With that, you can add a simple function to your theme templates and set configure what and how to show the posts or pages list.

Also, a new Online Manual has been published.

All this time I was developing for WordPress, I hosted all development pages and posts in my personal blog. Recently I started new development projects and the time to go an step beyond has arrived. It’s time to host all my projects in their own site.  And this is the site!

At the same time, I’m working to set up some tools to provide more information about the projects, to get more feedback and to provide you with all the documentation to install, use, and hack the software. Also, some better way to provide support will be online in the near future.

The new thinks you will finde here, are the following:

• All the site is about projects and development focused on WordPress. Nothing more that distracts you. The site will be written completely in English, so you will not find posts in Catalan or Spanish. All information will be useful to you!
• A new bug track system is now online. There you can find or report bugs or feature requests for all plugins and themes.
• A wiki software will host all projects manuals. You will have to search in posts to find the up-to-date manuals.
• In the near future, new forums will be installed, so you will have a place where to get support and help other users.

Of course, there is a lot to do next days and weeks. The blog design must be adapted to this site, as it has been taken from my personal blog and old developments. The theme I used is temporary while developing and rewriting my Chameleon Theme.

Hope you will find this site more useful than before and. Wish my projects are interesting to you.

All you know this plugin is under development, and It has not any stable release. As it is under development, current features will have some small changes and improvements. At the same time I’m spending almost all my development time to it (wile doing so many things more).

By now, I’m planning abut the best way to have an early release for it, maybe cutting down some planed features for the first milestone. This don’t mean that such features will be forgotten, it only means that before staring developing them, I’m planning to get an earlier stable release without some planned features.

At this moment, the planned milestones for development and stable releases are:

First Milestone

• User profiles, list and pages.
• User Gallery with pictures, avatars and thumbnails.
• Custom Logo on login page.

Second Milestone.

• Private messaging system.
• Improvements on privacy settings (per user based).
• Custom user fields in profiles, registration and login page.

Third Milestone.

• Integrated forum system. Most probably a deep bbPress integration.

New Alkivia Site

At the same time, I’m setting up a site for Alkivia. You will find this new site at http://alkivia.org.

Plans are to be the site where to hold all about Alkivia Community and my other developments for WordPress, with some new developments related to WordPress. It is planned to provide there a deeper user and developer documentation, some kind of support forums and a track system to report enhancements and bugs found.

Don’t have a timeline for this site, but hope will start running really son. Probably the new site will replace all development sections on my personal blog, which I want to dedicate to my hobbies.

One of the functionalities Alkivia provides, is the possibility to change the Instant Messenger labels on all user profile pages. Unfortunately, WordPress didn’t provide any easy way to do that. And I created this enhancement to make it easy.

The enhancement was submitted to the WordPress database and was accepted and included for the next version. But, this version is not yet ready, and some people will not upgrade.

To make this functionality work, you need to edit the file user-edit.php, located in wp-admin and make the changes you can see at WordPress Trac. If you don’t want to edit the file yourself, you can download the edited file for WP 2.7.1.

This is the current development status for the Alkivia plugin:

Working features (some works partially):

• Customize the logo on your login’s page. By now the logo must be in uploads/alkivia/login.png.
• Use the local avatars if them exists. Avatars must be named user_nicename.thumbnail.jpg and located on uploads/userphoto.
• User list is shown, but not paged. Links to the user page still not working.
• Settings page for profiles. (May need more or less settings).
• Settings page for galley. (May need more or less settings).

NOTES:

• uploads refers to your uploads folder configured on WordPress.
• Default settings are still not filled. So the first thing to do is to fill them manually.
• Picture folders will change in next builds.