The fork’s purpose was to address some of the unsolved issues of the original plugin. A few months ago Alex, the original author of the SyntaxHighlighter has released version 2.0 of this wonderful script. It was written from the ground up and has fixed a lot of issues people were having with the old script.

Now, Viper007Bond has released his implementation based on the new code, and has renamed his project to SyntaxHighlighter Evolved. It is also a brand new codebase and it has fixed a number of issues users have reported to both his and my plugins.

The users of both plugins should be excited to see Viper007Bond’s come back, I know I am. :)

As a result of this, I am now abandoning SyntaxHighlighter Plus in favour of Viper007Bond’s SyntaxHighlighter Evolved. If and when the latter project is no longer being maintained, I will fork it again and make sure we, the Wordpress users, will always have this wonderful syntax highlighter at our disposal.

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If you have been using v1.0b2 already, please re-download the package and overwrite the existing one, as Wordpress had mistakenly put the SVN version tag for v1.0b2.

Change log:

• Upgraded SyntaxHighlighter to 2.0.296
• Added automatic SSL detection (thanks to g30rg3_x)
• Added anti-XSS and XSRF (thanks to g30rg3_x)
• Language aliases fix
• Code clean up

I will contribute to the Alex’s SyntaxHighlighter project for problems and bugs people have reported. Contributed code will then be merged back to SyntaxHighlighter Plus.

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SyntaxHighlighter Plus is now updated too, to use the new 2.0 engine.

Head over to the release post for download links and more information.

Please note that this is a beta release. Please report bugs and issues in the comments section.

Thanks!

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Please head to the plugin page or the Wordpress page for more information.

Caution: If you have altered your CSS file, make sure you back it up if you’re going to use Wordpress 2.5’s automatic plugin upgrade.

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So far so good, things are pretty smooth. If you’re going to upgrade too, remember to backup all your files! I for instance have accidentally overwritten my theme files, so I had to take them from the backup.

About the new back-end: I don’t really like it. To be honest I prefer the old style any day. The new back-end lacks contrast (too bright actually), making things more difficult to recognise. Also, when posting, some of the options such as the categories are now down the bottom. Why? We do still have a sidebar, why not use it?

The new back-end also has some styling issues: e.g. on a wide screen, everything is squeezed to the left. I say bring back the fluid page width!

2.5 has some highlights though. We now finally have a asset management feature (file management and gallery), it is simple but still better than nothing. The automatic plugin upgrade feature works really well! Just remember to CHMOD your plugin directory (wp-content/plugins) to 777.

I haven’t fully experienced with this new installation yet, but I am not that impressed with it, mainly because the back-end is in my opinion worse than the old one in terms of user experience.

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Before I go on talking about the plugins, you should know that this by no means is a complete list of useful plugins even though I have tried much more than what is in the list.

Here it begins, the list is in alphabetic order.

AJAX Comments

Link: http://wordpress.smullindesign.com/plugins/ajax-comments

This is probably one of the first plugins I looked for and installed. In my opinion everyone should install this, it creates a far more user-friendly user experience. In case you don’t know what AJAX is, it is basically a combination of existing technologies to create refresh-less web pages. You post your comment and get the feedback within the same page without having to reload it.

All in One SEO Pack

Link: http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is a commonly used technique to increase website rankings in search engines such as Google and Yahoo. I personally build all websites with SEO in mind. Wordpress by default does not do enough SEO optimisations, by turning on fancy permalinks will improve it but still not enough. This plugin inserts keywords and other META tags in runtime, so the keywords are always related to the content of the current page.

cforms II

Link: http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin

As the name suggests, cforms II is a form creation plugin. The purpose and only purpose of this plugin, is to create web forms. Navigate to the ‘About‘ section and you will see that my contact form is built by cforms II. :)

It is *very* simple to use. You build the form, and then simply insert the code (one line) wherever you want the form to be. The latest version is packaged with heaps of different styles, and if you are still not happy you may always make your own.

Chunk Urls for WordPress

Link: http://www.village-idiot.org/archives/2006/06/29/wp-chunk/

Sometimes users will post some extremely long URLs in the comments. Well it isn’t their fault, a URL is one string, so it will take the entire horizontal space without word breaking. This plugin shortens extremely long URLs so they won’t break your page design. Very useful!

Defensio Anti-Spam

Link: http://defensio.com/

Defensio is an anti-spam tools similar to Akismet. Even though Akismet is bundled with Wordpress, I find Defensio to be more effective in most circumstances.

Digg This

Link: http://www.aviransplace.com/index.php/digg-this-wordpress-plugin/

The digg buttons you see on the page are created by this plugin. Before settling down with this plugin, I have researched a lot and tried all of the available similar solutions. This is the only one that meets my requirement.

First of all, it has to produce valid HTML markups. I have tried a few plugins that feature-wise is perfect, but produce invalid HTML markups. :(

Also, the plugin needs to be ’smart’. This is not a high profile website, so there is no reason to display digg buttons in every single post. Only the ones have been dugg need to be displayed (as you can see on this blog).

I should probably mention the ‘runner-up’: DiggClick. It works really well, everything is automatic and can be configured in the back-end (Digg This has to be configured manually by editing files). However, the version I have (1.3b) has a bug: it won’t correctly detect which posts have been dugg, so there is no way to display digg buttons on only the dugg ones. The author’s website is not accessible any more so I was enable to get hold of the latest version (1.7). What a shame.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

RSS feed plugin. Some people prefer to use the default RSS interfaces but I like FeedBurner. :)

Link: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/help/wordpress_quickstart

Google Analyticator

Link: http://cavemonkey50.com/code/google-analyticator/

If you use Google Analytics, then this is very handy tool for you. It automatically inserts the required JavaScript code to your templates, and there are some options you can configure too.

Google XML Sitemaps

Link: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/

The name says all. Having an up-to-date sitemap is good for SEO. :)

Simple Tags

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-tags

Simple Tags is very simple to use, but not so simple in terms of features! Not only can you edit tags in the post interface (with features such as suggested tags), but it also provides a dedicated interface for mass edit! It is a great tool to create and manage your post tags! You know what, this is part of the SEO strategy too: cross referencing posts!

Sociable

Link: http://www.joostdevalk.nl/wordpress/sociable/

Finding a perfect social bookmarking plugin isn’t easy. I spent a few hours researching and trying different plugins just like I did with the digg button. Finally I nailed down to this one. Same reason to the digg button: I need it to produce valid HTML. Furthermore, the plugin has to be configurable, transparent (no middle-man services) and easy to use. As you can see on this blog, the generated icons are very clean, it won’t distract the readers too much (hopefully!).

SyntaxHighlighter Plus

Link: http://thislab.com/2007/12/16/release-wordpress-plugin-syntaxhighlighter-plus/

Ah ha! This is the plugin I released two months ago, it was based on the already useful SyntaxHighlighter. For more information just check out the link. :) Since I am a developer, I frequently need to post code snippets, this plugin is a must for me.

By the way, I also did a lot of research before I went on working on this particular one. Other similar plugins just don’t seem to produce the same quality of code highlight and/or HTML markups.

WordPress.com Stats

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. It is very useful for quickly finding out your blog stats. For more thorough stats and reports, I recommend using Google Analytics.

WP-DBManager

Link: http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php

Database backup and manipulation tool. It seems a little bit redundant if you have a powerful control panel such as cPanel (which has these features built in, and are more powerful). Nevertheless it is a very convenient tool. I often choose to optimise my database tables in WP-DBManager, just so that I don’t have to open another Firefox tab for PhpMyAdmin.

WP 2.3 Related Posts

Link: http://fairyfish.net/2007/09/12/wordpress-23-related-posts-plugin/

This plugin creates related posts via tags. Another useful SEO tool. :)

WP Super Cache

Link: http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/

In my opinion the best cache plugin for Wordpress! It is especially useful for high profile websites. By turning the cache on, you will have a good chance surviving from a Digg Effect. ;)

—

Alright, so these are all the plugins I currently installed. Feel free to share your experience, or if you have other useful plugins you wanted to recommend, just drop a comment at anytime! :D

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Latest version: v1.0b2 [2009-03-02]

As part of the ‘house-warming party’ (for the (re)launching of the website) gift, I now announce the immediate availability of SyntaxHighlighter Plus. :-)

The official Wordpress plugin page is located here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/syntaxhighlighter-plus/

What is SyntaxHighlighter Plus?

SyntaxHighlighter Plus is a Wordpress plugin for code syntax highlighting. It is an enhanced version of the original SyntaxHighlighter by Matt, Viper007Bond and mdawaffe. Please give them a big applause for making such a great plugin!

Features of SyntaxHighlighter

SyntaxHighlighter allows you to easily post syntax highlighted code all without loosing it’s formatting or making an manual changes.

It supports the following languages (the alias for use in the post is listed next to the name):

• Bash — bash, sh
• C++ — cpp, c, c++
• C# — c#, c-sharp, csharp
• CSS — css
• Delphi — delphi, pascal
• Diff — diff
• Groovy — groovy
• Java — java
• JavaScript — js, jscript, javascript
• Perl — perl, pl
• PHP — php
• Plain text — plain, text
• Python — py, python
• Ruby — rb, ruby, rails, ror
• Scala — scala
• SQL — sql
• VB — vb, vb.net
• XML/HTML — xml, html, xhtml, xslt

This plugin uses the SyntaxHighlighter JavaScript package by Alex Gorbatchev.

What is the difference between SyntaxHighlighter and SyntaxHighlighter Plus (prior to v1.0)?

SyntaxHighlighter Plus is built upon SyntaxHighlighter with extra features and bug fixes. In addition to the original version, SyntaxHighlighter Plus has the following extra goodies:

• Valid XHTML markup (courtesy of mhavila)
• Background expand fix (partially courtesy of brucknerite)
• Corrected Overflow issues
• More syntax variants

New in SyntaxHighlighter Plus v1.0 !

Starting from SyntaxHighlighter Plus v1.0, the core engine is upgraded to
Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter 2.0!

New features since the 1.5 engine:

• CSS Themes
• Line highlighting
• HTML with script tags
• Smart line wrapping
• No-CSS fallback
• Strict & XHTML compliant
• Inline URL detection

Click here to view the complete version matrix.

Is SyntaxHighlighter Plus backward compatible?

Yes! Simply replace the original SyntaxHighlighter files and that’s it! Start from version 0.13, the plugin folder was renamed to ’syntaxhighlighter-plus’.

How to install and use this plugin?

Please refer to SyntaxHighlighter’s project page.

Examples

The examples are using the RDark theme.

PHP

	function BBCodeToHTML( $content ) {
		if ( !$this->CheckForBBCode( $content ) ) return $content;

		$matches = $this->GetBBCode( $content );

		if ( empty($matches) ) return $content; // No BBCode found, we can stop here

		// Loop through each match and replace the BBCode with HTML
		foreach ( (array) $matches as $match ) {
			$language = strtolower( $match[4] );
			$content = str_replace( $match[0], '<pre class="syntax-highlight:' . $language . "\">" . htmlspecialchars( $match[5] ) . "</pre>", $content );
			$this->jsfiles2load[$this->languages[$language]] = TRUE;
		}

		return $content;
	}

CSS

.dp-highlighter
{
	font-family: "Consolas", "Courier New", Courier, mono;
	font-size: 12px;
	background-color: #E7E5DC;
	width: 530px;
	margin: 18px 0 18px 0;
	padding-top: 1px;/* adds a little border on top when controls are hidden */
	overflow: auto;

	/* fixes for IE: "overflow: auto" causes unnecessary vertical bar */
	/* corrects bottom scroll bar overlapping */
	overflow-y: hidden;
	padding-bottom: expression(this.scrollWidth > this.offsetWidth ? 15 : 0);
}

Syntax

Bold ones are exclusive to SyntaxHighlighter Plus. Furthermore, quotation marks around the language can be omitted.

• [source language=’css’] … [/source]
• [code language=’css’] … [/code]
• [sourcecode lang=’css’] … [/sourcecode]
• [source lang=’css’] … [/source]
• [code lang=’css’] … [/code]
• [sourcecode=’css’] … [/sourcecode]
• [source=’css’] … [/source]
• [code=’css’] … [/code]
• [lang=’css’] … [/lang]
• [css] … [/css]

License

GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

Changelog

v1.0b2 [2009-03-02]

• Upgraded SyntaxHighlighter to 2.0.296
• Added automatic SSL detection (thanks to g30rg3_x)
• Added anti-XSS and XSRF (thanks to g30rg3_x)
• Language aliases fix
• Code clean up

v1.0b1 [2009-02-07]

• Upgraded the core engine to SyntaxHighlighter 2.0
• Added configuration: themes
• Default language changed from PHP to plain text

v0.18 [2008-07-19]

• Added PHP as the default language if no language is specified (e.g. [ code ][ /code ])

v0.17 [2008-06-28]

• Fixed a bug in the Bash highlighting code which caused conflicts between keywords and variables highlights

v0.16 [2008-06-02]

• Ported SyntaxHighlighter 1.1.1 changes: ‘Encode single quotes so wptexturize() doesn’t transform them into fancy quotes and screw up code.’

v0.15b [2008-05-07]

• CSS fixes for IE6

v0.15a [2008-05-07]

• Enhanced CSS

v0.15 [2008-05-01]

• Fixed the IE scroll bar issue (backup your CSS file before upgrade!)

v0.14 [2008-04-22]

• Added support for Bash (thanks to Nick Anderson)
• Now supports Wordpress MU (thanks to Tim)

v0.13 [2007-12-19]

• Changed plugin folder to ’syntaxhighlighter-plus’.

v0.12 [2007-12-18] – Broken!

• Appeared on the Wordpress plugins site.
• Fixed readme.txt.
• Cleaned up the files.

v0.11 [2007-12-16]

• Added more syntax variants.

v0.10 [2007-12-16]

• Initial release.

Download

v1.0b2 Wordpress Official Mirror
v1.0b1 Wordpress Official Mirror
v0.18 Wordpress Official Mirror
v0.17 Wordpress Official Mirror
v0.16 Wordpress Official Mirror
v0.15b Wordpress Official Mirror
v0.15a Wordpress Official Mirror
v0.15 Wordpress Official Mirror
v0.14 Wordpress Official Mirror
v0.13 Wordpress Official Mirror
v0.12 Wordpress Official Mirror
v0.11 Wordpress Official Mirror
v0.10 Wordpress Official Mirror

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I had a very tiring day, actually it’s a two-day roll. I’ve been completely sucked into making the theme working, and as a result of that I did not sleep at all last night. Fortunately the website is now up and running, all the basic stuff are done so in the upcoming few days I will be doing more adjustments and tweaks.

A few moments ago I took a quick nap, and I woke up seeing my theme was gone: Wordpress reverted back the system to its default theme (K2). I never encountered such problem before so I googled it. Sadly no satisfactory results had been found. Right now I’m just going to rename the theme to ‘default’, seems to be working fine. :)

To make the site more user friendly and eye catching, I’ve installed this AJAX comments plugin. It works really well. The best part is, it is completely non-obtrusive! Drop the plugin to the Wordpress plugin folder, enable it, and voila! On the side note, the plugin has just recently switched from Script.aculo.us to jQuery, which works very well for me, since I’m a jQuery-er. :-)

I also spent sometime playing with AJAXed WP and Better-Than-Live AJAX Search. While they’re really cool, they don’t offer the same level of user friendliness. In order to make the two plugins work I had to mess around with the theme, which make ‘em not so portable and may potentially break in the future releases of Wordpress.

All in all though, I am enjoying using Wordpress and I’m really glad to see it progressing well. :)

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