The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

The NCAA basketball tournament starts Thursday (well, technically tonight with the 1st Four).  This is the Most Wonderful Time of the Year (I have that Christmas carol running through my head which Staples also uses for very funny, if you are a parent, Back to School shopping commercial) – I love college basketball and the week of conference tournaments and the NCAA tournament is one of my favorite times of the year.  It is also one of my most least productive times of the year.

BigEastReligionI graduated from Villanova (hence the VU logo for my avatar) and am bullish on the Wildcats this year.  I think they can play with anyone in the country save Kentucky.  Living in North Carolina, I am particularly intrigued by the potential match up on Saturday with NC State.  VU has not done well in the tournament since their 2009 Final 4 run.  I am hoping the recent string of early exits ends this year.

If you’re wondering why updates to Email Users and Google Forms are so slow coming out, it is because I am a bit preoccupied and wasting lots of time reading the analysis from all of the college hoop pundits.  I am also going over my brackets for the various pools I am in.  Once the tournament is over, particularly after Villanova loses, my attention will return to my various projects and updates will become a bit more predictable.

 

Email Users v4.7.1-beta-2 available

This evening I released beta-2 of Email Users v4.7.1.  This build addresses a couple of issues and introduces a new filter which allows manipulation of portions of the generated email headers.

The Dashboard Widget can now be disabled.  It is on by default but can be turned off with a setting (Dashboard > Settings > Email Users).

There have been several requests to support wpMandrill.  It wasn’t until recently that I learned that in addition to overloading wp_mail(), Mandrill requires the recipient addresses to be in the TO header where as Email Users uses the BCC header to send email.

I didn’t want to make it simple to use the TO header instead of the BCC header as I view it as risky.  Exposing the recipients of a mass mailing is a no-no.  However, Mandrill is widely used and with several requests, I needed a safe yet viable solution.

The new mailusers_manipulate_headers allows the user to modify the headers so they’ll work with Mandrill while not making it too easy to do so.  Here is an example of how the headers could/would be modified to have the recipients in the TO header instead of the BCC header.

/**
 * wpMandrill needs the recipients in the TO header instead
 * of the BCC header which Email Users uses by default. This
 * filter will move all of the recipients from the BCC header
 * into the TO header and clean up any formatting and then nuke
 * the BCC header.
 *
 */
function mailusers_mandrill_headers($to, $headers, $bcc)
{
    // Copy the BCC headers to the TO header without the "Bcc:" prefix
    $to = preg_replace('/^Bcc:\s+/', '', $bcc) ;

    // Empty out the BCC header
    $bcc = array() ;

    return array($to, $headers, $bcc) ;
}

add_filter('mailusers_manipulate_headers', 'mailusers_mandrill_headers', 10, 3) ;

This code would be placed in the functions.php file.  More details can found in the ReadMe.txt file.  The example above is now included with the plugin, you can find it in the examples directory.

Email Users Beta (24437 downloads )

Google Forms v0.73-beta-4

This evening I released beta-4 of Google Forms v0.73.  This builds add support for Right to Left (RTL) languages by adding a column order option when using multiple columns.  This functionality was requested earlier today on the Support Forum and was very easy to implement as the jQuery Columnizer plugin already supported RTL.  The only other change is an update of the language translation files.

Google Forms Beta (31895 downloads )