WP-Slimbox2 v1.0.2 Released!

I’m a bit late writing this post, but it seems like every time I make major changes to my plugin, I get hammered with a bunch of little glitches that effect a bunch of people other than me. I suppose that’s the downside of not having a group of people to do beta testing for you. On the plus side, I’ve been doing my best to stay apprised of problems as they arise in the support forums (and even those from people who….irritatingly…fail to read about posting problems in the support forums and post them in comments or on the WP site).

I think, and hope, that I’ve finally ironed out all the little glitches. The only problem I’m still aware of is actually not a problem with the plugin so much as it is a problem with other plugins and themes that fail to properly load jQuery by using wp_enqueue_script(). It always bugs me when people have problems with my plugin because of someone else’s poor coding practice. It bugs me when people have problems with my own poor coding, but at least I have only myself to blame for that!

For those of you curious as to what was done in the 1.0.2 release, I patched a rather glaring error related to Internet Explorer, a potential XSS vulnerability, and an obscure updating issue. I also added a Turkish/Türkçe Translation, graciously provided by Serhat Yolaçan and an updated French/Français Translation again provided by Jandry.

For those of you who are curious, the XSS vulnerability was due to an issue discussed here, by Mark Jaquith. While I understand how one could trigger the exploits, I don’t fully understand how those exploits do any damage, but whatever the case, it’s been resolved. I don’t actually think this was a real security issue for most people, since you have to be logged into the admin options to access it, but in WordPress MU installs it could have been an issue. Either way, upgrade! Fixing this issue also had the added bonus of fixing an issue where one user was unable to update their Slimbox settings because somehow the form was submitting the server directory path, and not the url path. I don’t really know what caused that in the first place, nor do I know why it wasn’t a problem in previous versions of the plugin, but it’s fixed, so I won’t complain.

The issue with Internet Explorer likely effected more people, given the prevalence of IE users out there, and unfortunately was tied into my transition from dynamic JS files to static JS files. Essentially I was trying to convert a string array of numbers into an integer array of numbers, so I used a function I’d found, .map(Number). Unfortunately, I failed to then test the script in IE, since I would have discovered that apparently that function isn’t supported by IE. There’s likely a much better way to do it, but ultimately I wound up manually writing a loop to create the integer array and allow the script to work correctly in IE.

I’m hoping to have version 1.0.3 out later this week, but this update should only interest people who use the Spanish/Español, Dutch/Nederlandse, and German/Deutsch translations, or would like to use the plugin in Simplified Chinese! That’s right, the next release will include Simplified Chinese thanks to easespot.

Hopefully I’m done with major updates to the plugin, and future releases will be limited to simply adding translations, but if you have good ideas feel free to post them to our support forums and I’ll see what I can do.