The observant might have noticed a new link on the right-hand side of this page. YAK Gallery is the first premium add-on for YAK, providing an easy way to present a gallery of products with a simple short-tag. You can have multiple galleries on one page, tag products so that they appear in more than one gallery, and hopefully the simple id and class attributes should make it relatively easy to style the presentation. Add the lightbox-2 plugin for quick zoom of gallery pics.

The YAK Demo Site has a demo of the add-on in action.

Not much to report in this latest version of YAK. Suburb (in the address entry screen) is now optional, and javascript usage has been streamlined to use more jQuery (less functions overall, which makes it easier to maintain).

The main point of note is that YAK is now being tested against WP3 only. 2.1.7 is still supported for WP2 users, for the moment, and I’ll make bug fix releases against that version as necessary.

And the award for the most gratuitous over-acting in a football game goes to Brazil. With an (dis)honourable mention to the Ivory Coast.

So, versions 2.1.2 through 2.1.6 went by without any official announcement, so it seems like it’s probably a good idea to note that 2.1.7 will be the last release of YAK for the v2 series of WordPress (other than a bug fix release or two, perhaps).

Changes (in this latest release) since 2.1.1 include:

2.1.2

• Fix bug with sales tax via manual CC entry, along with removal of spurious <td>
• Fix bug with sales tax via accounts receivable entry

2.1.3

• Fix sales tax in PayPal Std checkouts

2.1.4

• Fix processing problem with failed Authorize.net payments
• Fix rounding issue with sales tax values sent to PayPal

2.1.5

• Fix bug with confirmation email (missing sales tax, totals wrong)

2.1.6

• Add back missing code to handle unlimited quantities

2.1.7

• Fix problem with incorrectly calculated shipping after validation error
• Increase timeout on Authorize.net connections (occasionally seems to cause a problem)
• Fix problem with unlimited quantity handling
• Add shipping type to email flags
• Add check for the address_entry function existing (seems to cause an incompatibility with another plugin)

The next release (which may not include any major changes at all), will be 2.2.0, which will be the first official version tested against WP3.

YAK 2.1.1 has just been released. Some fairly comprehensive changes have gone into this version. On the stability/security side of things, YAK now uses WP’s SQL “prepare” facility (this is to stop things like SQL injection attacks). From a bug fix perspective, you’ll notice the product edit form (when editing a post) is now draggable (thanks to a contributor), and promo price calculation had a bug in some environments which should now be resolved.

In terms of new features, I’ve added public key encryption for storage of CC details. With the recent news about WordPress blogs hacked on a shared host (http://blogcastfm.com/announcements/warning-massive-number-of-godaddy-wordpress-blogs-hacked-this-weekend/), and various comments about many people on shared web hosts who don’t secure their WP config files properly, it seems prudent to provide the facility for more security for users of the manual CC payment feature. YAK settings are now split into 4 separate screens (General, Shipping, Sales Tax, Advanced) — on the Advanced tab you’ll find a button for generating a public/private key. The public key can be used for encrypting CC numbers, and the private key for decrypting. I’ll be adding some more detail to the FAQ at some point soon.

I’ve also added the facility to require a login for certain products, added more values to the third-party-integration event, and also incrementing item quantity (rather than displaying an error message) when the customer clicks on the buy button for an item which is already in the cart (configurable, of course). The biggest feature addition is the first version of sales tax calculations. This works in a vaguely similar way to shipping (except without the zones), but also provides for federal and state based taxes for the US. If your country has a similar requirement (state versus federal taxes), let me know, and hopefully I can fit that into a subsequent release.

Kudos have to go to Joe Ehrensberger for translating “Snake Wrangling for Kids” into German.

The completed edition of Schlangengerangel für Kinder was just released today. PDFs for Windows, Linux and Mac versions can be downloaded from the Google Code site (this link will take you directly to the downloads).

Au ja!

It looks like the entire United Kingdom… or at least the percentage involved in property… needs Emergency Remedial Mathematics lessons.

The UK economy leaps out of recession, like a grasshopper trying to jump on Jupiter, triggering a mass hallucinatory episode amongst real estate agents whom, I can only guess, come to the incorrect conclusion that “0.1%” is somehow a fraction representing “1 percent”, and consequently re-list all their properties using a multiple of that figure.

Optimism abounds. :-]

Well, version 2 actually, rather than a Rod Stewart/Tina Turner duet.

YAK version 2 has just been released (the WP site should update shortly). This is a major release, with a large number of changes. Most important to note for upgraders, is YAK now uses WordPress’s shortcode API and also supports multiple shipping options. See the change list below for what this actually means, but before upgrading, I recommend taking a note of your current shipping configuration, and taking a backup of your WP environment (just to be safe).

Changes include (note, read braces {} below as square brackets []):

• Updated the codebase to use WordPress’s shortcodes API. This means the old parameter style (e.g. {yak_price type id}) is replaced by the new style {yak_price id=”" type=”"}. For example, {yak_price small 23} becomes {yak_price id=”23″ type=”small”}. {yak_quantity medium} becomes {yak_quantity type=”medium”}
• Renamed {error_message} tag to {yak_error_message} (for consistency’s sake)
• Added a {yak_sku} tag. This takes the id and type parameters (same as yak_size). For example, {yak_sku type=”small”}
• Added a facility for loading custom modules
• Added “Proceed to checkout” link to yak order widget
• Added support for multiple shipping options (this means you’ll need to reconfigure your shipping settings — on the plus side, YAK now supports more than one shipping option). Shipping is now configured in a separate screen (YAK Shipping), and is broken into 3 tabs – Basic (the basic config settings, including where you can specify what shipping options you support), Zones (specify which country belongs to which zone), and Options (where you can set the price of shipping to each zone for each option).
• Added a test facility for the confirmation email message
• Added (very) basic low stock notification
• Changed “Buy” button on the initial cart page to “Checkout”
• Added an option to include the price on Buy Button drop-down (i.e. multi options)
• Changed ID on the buy button so that it’s unique
• Added “PAYMENT_PROCESSED” option to the orders screen — for orders which have been (manually) paid (either manual credit card or deposit/cheque, for example) but not yet shipped.
• Added “DELETE” option to the orders screen — only allows orders which are CANCELLED or in ERROR to be deleted

ADDENDUM: there was a minor Javascript bug I missed fixing (and meant to before the release), so version 2.0.1 will be on the update site shortly.

This is cool – SWFK was the top voted comment (option?) on a recent stack overflow discussion about programming for 11 year olds:
stackoverflow.com/…/which-programming-language-is-manageable-by-an-11-year-old-kid

There’s finally a German version in progress:
code.google.com/p/swfk-de/

Here’s a news group discussion about SWFK being used (at least in part) for a course on teaching Python:
archives.seul.org/schoolforge/…/msg00041.html

And finally, the book also made the list of beginner’s tools on the sugarlabs wiki:
wiki.sugarlabs.org/…/Resources

Chuffed.

Here’s a judge who has completely lost touch with reality:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6811239/Businessman-jailed-for-attacking-intruder—who-goes-free.html

Quote:

It’s difficult to believe that this outcome reflects the thinking of the public, or the interests of justice.

I would say not difficult… more like impossible.