ECI Version 6.3.5 – Categories
First I want to say thank you for your patience regarding the download area being offline. I know some of you are becoming frustrated. The download area is offline due to a conflict with the latest version of WordPress, it was not foreseen. Priority still goes to improving the plugin itself and I will do my best to send the plugin by email. I delayed sending the plugin to most people during the last 2 days because this version was coming and it is important to everyone.
I will try to send it to everyone from here on. I will be working on the new merge and list features for a few more days as that feature was actually paid for and could be far better. After that the new download area will become priority.
Category Splitter Submission
Firstly, your actual separator value from the Settings page will show on the Special Functions panel. The submission is far clearer, also showing your saved separator rather than a hard coded one which was a forward slash. Previously I was splitting the category values or terms and displaying them on a single line. For some reason I displayed them seperated by commas, a sort of standard approach after exploded/splitting a string of values. However in a plugin of this nature where comma is a big deal, it was obviously confusing. So, now each term is on its own line and also has a label; Parent or Child. Making it instantly clear if the test on submission worked for a single record. This has nothing to do with the new test buttons, they will actually create categories when complete.
Category Splitter Fixed
Now creates up to three levels of categories with proper hierarchy using the separator you have saved in Settings. Please remember to refresh the Categories page to make your created categories show properly. You may need to create a category then deleted it due to a WordPress cache issue when mass creating categories. I re-wrote the script that handles Category Creation by Splitter. Well I actually copied the main Category Creation script and modified it.
Category Splitter Leaves Spaces Alone
Previously, the category splitter function would remove spaces from category terms. I’m not sure why I thought this had to be done but obviously some categories may be two separate words and so this was not a good idea.
Third Level Category Hierarchy Fault
This fault popped up when I upgraded WordPress. It seems the function used to add meta now returns an array instead of just an ID. This has been corrected, your third categories will now be assigned as children to the second categories.
Easy Project Automatic Post Type
There was still further improvement to be made here. The Easy Project system is no where near complete so I will be re-visiting it daily to tweek it and get closer to total accuracy. All your feedback is helping. Obviously I need to get to know every popular theme to make this happen so your feedback is appreciated a lot.
Menu Page Conflict With OZH Horizontal Menu
I actually knew about a conflict a while ago but the nature of the conflict change and became a little more serious. It also became a lot clearer on the cause so I was easy to fix it. Clicking on ECI on the admin menu bar no longer causes a blank page.
Special Functions New Columns
I added 2 new columns to the Special Functions form. One holds buttons and the other holds descriptions to what each button does, or will. The buttons are test buttons, not in action right now but over time they will be. Each button, being for a totally different type of feature, will trigger a totally different type of test. I’m also considering allowing some of the buttons to be used to get some of the projects work done early, to lighten the load during a massive post creation event. Think this is a good idea? Please comment below. Not sure what I mean? Well considering 200,000 records and you want all of the images to be stored locally. Instead of copying them from your data providers server during post creation, we do it early and get it out the way. The new Local image URL would be stored with each record and used during post creation as the featured image. Question is, is it really worth doing? I mean, we can break down the main event anyway, so why not just create 50,000 posts, wait for a while then create another 50,000 when we think our server has rested from being overworked!