I’ve recently been using Stack Overflow quite a bit and find the discussions have helped me out often. I’ve decided to use the recently published API to allow a WordPress blog to retrieve and display information from the Stack Overflow family of sites via a widget or shortcode, whichever suits the given situation.

I’ve only recently begun work on the plugin but plan to release it publicly in the next few weeks. The plugin is called StackPress and I hope you all enjoy it.

More importantly, Tag Gallery 0.8 with all the super goodies is very close to being finished. Widgets, Shortcode UI, new caching mechanism and Admin page with cache manager and setting defaults. It no longer relies on TimThumb so we can hide the thumbnail generation mechanism and get rid of the exposure it may cause. You can choose to use the old Tag Gallery version from the Admin page if you like but you will not get any goodies, just a few bug fixes. It also has a template system so you can make your own templates. Many effects have been added including grayscale, sepia, mirroring, water-marking and many more to come.

Most interesting, this release will mark the beginning Tag Gallery being able to handle more than just images. The architecture has changed drastically so we could, potentially, generate thumbnail previews of any file type including Video, PDF, ODT and many more. If the particular file type does not yet have a generator it can use an icon from the Media Library representing that file type. This feature is in the very early stages of development but it should be full steam rolling by the release of 1.0, which should be sometime in the late summer.

Anyhow, I had hoped to release an update to Tag Gallery by mid January but it doesn’t pay the bills. I am devoting much of my free time to it’s development though so I’m hoping to release it any day now. When you see Tag Gallery instances in the sidebar of this site you will know I’m within a week of it’s release.

Aloha!

4 Comments on the original. They’ll get here. Archived with comments at:

https://web.archive.org/web/20111228132804/http://johnnypeck.com/stackpress-and-tag-gallery-update