I’m switching all my sites over to a single 3.0 installation, with the new MultiSite capabilities. So the sites might be fruity for a while. In the process, I also expect to lose some things, such as the email subscriptions. Sorry about that, I’ll restore stuff like that later.
Archive for April 2010
Sorry about the STC and SFC errors
Sorry about that, folks. An inadvertent early check-in made it so some bugs crept into the releases I had scheduled today. I didn’t mean for those to get released when they did, and I didn’t notice it for a couple hours. So some people may have upgraded earlier than I wanted them to.
Versions 0.16 of Simple Facebook Connect and 0.6 of Simple Twitter Connect should not be used. Wait for the 0.16.1 and 0.6.1 releases to hit the repository. Those will work without the same sorts of errors.
If you are already having the major fatal error with Simple Twitter Connect, then delete the stc-comments.php and stc-publish.php files to make your site work again. Then upgrade to 0.6.1 and the working files will be restored.
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Plugin Programming Tip: Your Users Don't Read.
Over on my Simple Facebook Connect page, there’s lots of comments from users with problems. Having answered these for a while now, via there and via email, I’ve come to the conclusion that people don’t search for answers to their problems.
The “How to fix the Email Domain” problem is answered on that one page no less than 6 times, for example. Almost all the rest of the problems given come from the “wrong connect URL setup” issue.
So if you don’t want to do support all the time, I think you have to make your plugin smarter. Take the most common issues you see and make the plugin auto-detect the problems. That’s what I’ve done with SFC version 0.16, for example.
Error messages now show up when the user configured something wrong on Facebook.
The plugin now can detect these two major causes of problems and will display an error message. It also provides a link to the right place on Facebook to go and correct these problems. It can’t actually fix the problems directly (though that is possible… small steps), but I hope this will eliminate the need for me to continually have to answer the same questions over and over again.
So my tip for the day for plugin programmers: For robustness, make your plugin check for commonplace issues. And the issues that you think will be commonplace may not be the ones you expect, so figure on having to add more and more checks every time.
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