[Release] Version 1.0.6 of Feed Stats for WordPress

[Jonathan Wilde]

Hi Everybody!

It's time for the 1.0.6 release of Feed Stats for WordPress. The
biggest new feature of the plugin is support for internationalization.
I'd like to thank Bjoern Buerstinghaus for making use of this feature
and creating a fantastic translation of the plugin into German.

Here's what's new in version 1.0.6 of the plugin:

* Removed the scary Google FeedBurner error messages--Google
fixed their Awareness API issues.
* Fixed the bug (reported by Bjoern Buerstinghaus) where both the
Feed Stats options and Feed Stats stats pages' navigation menu items
would be highlighted at the same time when either of those pages were
viewed.
* Made the plugin fully translatable.
* Improved code cleanliness and documentation.
* Rewrote parts of the code that loads information from
FeedBurner to improve performance; it now makes only two data requests
(1.0.5 made four) to FeedBurner when the stats page is loaded.
* Set cache headers on the CSS file to improve performance.
* Improved compatibility with Windows servers.
* Formatted the dates in the tables below the charts according to
the date format option set in WordPress to increase readability.
* Added Bjoern Buerstinghaus's fantastic translation of the
plugin into German.
* Improved initial user experience by improving the messages to the user.
* Improved code quality by writing tests (using the SimpleTest
PHP testing toolkit) to ensure that the code works properly.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Jean-Paul Horn]

Hi Jonathan,

Very nice plugin, just installed this on my domain.I do have a
question/request though ;) If you choose to not activate item link
clicks in FeedBurner stats (like I did), the right half of the plugins
screen is essentially wasted. Would it be possible to either hide the
right part of the screen (where the click charts are supposed to be),
move it under the left column or just leave it out through an option
in your plugin settings?

My Feed Stats screen looks really squished and I can't figure out the
dates.
http://www.textopus.nl/varia/wp_feed_stats.png

Thanks for your efforts!

[Jonathan Wilde]

Hi!

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 5:51 PM, Jean-Paul Horn<in...@textopus.nl> wrote:
> Very nice plugin, just installed this on my domain.I do have a
> question/request though ;) If you choose to not activate item link
> clicks in FeedBurner stats (like I did), the right half of the plugins
> screen is essentially wasted. Would it be possible to either hide the
> right part of the screen (where the click charts are supposed to be),
> move it under the left column or just leave it out through an option
> in your plugin settings?

I'm currently working on a user-interface redesign for the plugin.
I'll be happy to add that into my plans!

> My Feed Stats screen looks really squished and I can't figure out the
> dates.
> http://www.textopus.nl/varia/wp_feed_stats.png

For future versions of the plugin, I'm working on ways to make the
display of dates in the charts more intelligent. A short term
solution would be to reduce the number of labels shown if there are
lots of points being displayed. A longer term solution might be to
change the unit of time displayed if there are large numbers of points
(i.e. if there are more that 30 days shown, month names, rather than
dates, would be shown).

Do these sound like good solutions to you?

Thanks for the feedback!
Jonathan

[Jean-Paul Horn]

> I'm currently working on a user-interface redesign for the plugin.
> I'll be happy to add that into my plans!

Thanks, that would be excellent (although the point is a little moot
if the right part of the screen is moved to under the first graph, as
this allows the 'Total Hits & Subscribers' graph to be much wider. The
table view just under the graph could also be made collapsible if
vertical screen estate (scrolling!) is an issue.

> For future versions of the plugin, I'm working on ways to make the
> display of dates in the charts more intelligent.  A short term
> solution would be to reduce the number of labels shown if there are
> lots of points being displayed.  A longer term solution might be to
> change the unit of time displayed if there are large numbers of points
> (i.e. if there are more that 30 days shown, month names, rather than
> dates, would be shown).
>
> Do these sound like good solutions to you?

Maybe a better implementation would be to just display Sundays/Mondays
(or 1|8|15|etc for every week) and for the other days just a tick mark
(via axis range: http://code.google.com/intl/nl/apis/chart/labels.html#axis_range).
Too bad the Google Graph API doesn't let you display the axis labels
diagonally :-(