After a couple of months of being unable to work on the new version of OIO, I’m glad to say I’m now able to get back to it.
I’m currently in the process of building a library of re-usable components that will deal with most of the laborious tasks automatically (the backbone of the opensource framework upon which OIO will be built). I did at one point consider using an existing library (Zend Framework, Kohana etc), but as many have found before me it’s not quite the same as doing it yourself.
As a quick example, I’ve most recently been working on an email component, in order to handle different protocols (SMTP, POP3, IMAP) and send / receive mail in any language automatically. Each component can be used independently of others, so as to make them usable in any development situation, but is kept as lightweight as possible.
Once I’ve constructed the final few generic components, I’ll be able to use them to develop the first prototype of OIO v3. As I mentioned previously, I won’t give any timeframes until I can tell you something accurate; otherwise it’s just a guess on my part.
Every so often I get requests for little additions for OIO. I’ve therefore just released a small plugin that tackles a few such requests in one go. They are not meant to be full blown features, but helpers for certain issues – such as integrating OIO with WPMU.
The main features are:
1.) Integrate a standalone installation of OIO with any Wordpress / WPMU blog (if you’ve got OIO installed as a Wordpress plugin, you can ignore this feature).
2.) Type a placeholder such as [% oiopub-banner-1-left %] into any of your Wordpress posts and it will automatically be converted into an OIO ad zone. The example would output banner zone 1 on the left of your post.
3.) Put an ad zone into your RSS feed.
For more information and to download the “addons” plugin, click here.
This morning I got an email saying a purchase (on this site) hadn’t been confirmed via the paypal IPN, and was forever “waiting to receive confirmation from the payment processor”. Initially I thought it must have been a one-off, but have since received several more reports of the same issue.
After a bit of searching, I found the following comment by a paypal developer:
Apologies for any inconvenience this issue with IPN may have caused you. We are aware of the issue and working it as high priority, to get it resolved as soon as possible.
As a workaround, if you use port 443, rather than port 80, IPN will work.
Once resolved, we will update any threads created for this issue, so that everyone is aware. Thanks for your continued patience!
I therefore did as suggested and added the option to use port 443 (if the server supports it) instead of port 80, which did indeed fix the problem. I’ve also added the same code to the OIO paypal module, since port 443 seems to be the recommended default now.
There’s no urgent need to upgrade, unless this problem persists for a while.
So, if you’re experiencing any problems with paypal IPNs today, now you know why!
Instead of writing a dreary specification document for you to sift through, I’ve put together a 1st draft of all your ideas and suggestions in the form of a mind map. Enjoy!
>> http://v3.oiopublisher.com/spec/v3-spec-1st-draft/
I’ve been asked on a few occasions during the ideas brainstorm for v3 about being able to display ad zones using different settings to those used in the admin area. For example, I have an ad zone using 125×125 ads, but on one of my sites I want to show the same ad zone using dimensions of 90×90.
Up until now, there was no way to accomplish this, since the output functions just used whatever was set in the admin. Whilst this type of thing will be fully resolved in v3, I thought I’d put together some alternative output functions for v2 that could do the same thing.
I haven’t yet released it as part of the official download, since the output is fundamental to everyone who uses OIO and so any bugs could cause quite a few problems for people upgrading. Instead, I’ve released it as a separate package that you can upload, which will over-write the default functions:
>> http://forum.oiopublisher.com/discussion/796/manipulating-ad-zone-output/
The link above contains all the information you should need on how to install and use these new output options. It supports both php and javascript, and won’t affect any of your current ad zones using the old output method.
