I need to temporarily discontinue offering personal support for my WordPress plugins. I sincerely apologize for this. I’m putting in time nights and weekend at my job – that and my family have to come first. I don’t expect my situation at work to be like this for more than a few more months. In the meantime, please use the comments thread on this post if you have questions, and I’m hoping you can support each other (there are at least a few savvy users of my plugins who have posted helpful comments in the past). I will try to jump in if I can to offer help, but I can’t promise it right now.

A couple years ago I wrote a post describing how to limit posts on your WordPress home page to ones in specific categories. A limitation of this approach is that it can only show recent posts that are in The Loop. Others have solved this problem as well, but all the solutions I’ve seen have this same limitation. What if posts in the categories you specify aren’t among your recent posts? Your home page would show no posts!

This was a problem for my new home page design. I’ve divided my site’s content into 3 major topics, and I show hyperlinked titles for the 3 most recent posts in each topic. But it’s possible that a topic may not have any posts among the most recent 10 posts, which is all The Loop knows about (10 is WordPress’ default setting for how many posts to show on your home page). So I want to get the most recent 3 posts for each topic, regardless of whether they happen to be in The Loop.

To do this, I created the following function and put it in my theme’s functions.php file. Note that I’m using a straight SQL query, which means this is not guaranteed to work in future versions of WordPress (the WP coders do a good job of maintaining a consistent programming API across versions, but they do change the database sometimes).

function get_top_category_posts ($term_ids) {
    global $wpdb;
    $top_3 = '';

    $results = $wpdb->get_results("select ID, post_title, post_date from wp_posts p
            inner join wp_term_relationships r on p.ID = r.object_id
            inner join wp_term_taxonomy t on t.term_taxonomy_id = r.term_taxonomy_id
            where t.term_id in ($term_ids) and p.post_type = 'post'
            order by post_date desc limit 3", ARRAY_A);

    foreach ($results as $result) {
        $top_3 .= "<li>" . date("M d", strtotime($result['post_date'])) . " - "
            . '<a href="' . get_permalink($result['ID']) . '">'
            . $result['post_title'] . "</a></li>\n";
    }

    return $top_3;
}

I then call it like this from my custom home page (where I’m not using The Loop at all):

<ul>
<?php echo get_top_category_posts('6,12,89,90,98,105,106,115'); ?>
</ul>

I’m passing the IDs for the categories I want. The easiest way to get a category ID is to go to its edit screen and note the cat_ID in the URL. This works for tag IDs also.

There are 3 database tables involved in the query: wp_posts contains your posts, wp_term_taxonomy contains the term IDs for categories (and tags), and wp_term_relationships connects the posts to their categories. Note that a cat_ID or tag_ID you see in an edit screen URL is actually called a term_id within the database. In this case I’m only retrieving the date and title of each post, but you could retrieve the entire post if you want (see the description of the wp_posts table).

If you want to simplify the query to improve performance, you can eliminate one of the table joins if you manually look up the term_taxonomy_id that corresponds to each category’s term_id, and pass those instead:

select ID, post_title, post_date from wp_posts
        inner join wp_term_relationships on ID = object_id
        where term_taxonomy_id in ($taxonomy_ids) and post_type = 'post'
        order by post_date desc limit 3

The downside of doing this is that every time you add a new category or tag, you’ll have to go into your database and look up its term_taxonomy_id. So I don’t recommend doing it this way unless you’re comfortable poking around in mySQL.

(Note to fellow cranky programmers: I know this is poorly abstracted – the need here is simple enough that, to me, abstraction didn’t seem worth the trouble).

Shashin’s popularity has recently spiked, which makes me happy, but it’s also caused a spike in support requests (my last Shashin post has 127 comments). Until the start of this year, I had been diligent in providing support, but my day job recently has been seeping into my nights and weekends, significantly reducing my availability. It’s likely to stay that way for the next several months.

I started on some major enhancements to Shashin early in the winter – most notably flickr and twitpic support – but it’s been on hold for a while now. At this point, my guess is that it’ll be summer before I can get back to it.

Please use the comment section on this post for support questions. I will do my best to provide responses twice per week. I will most likely not be able to delve into problems that involve the particulars of your server configuration, such as problems with connecting to Picasa via curl for unlisted albums (as those kinds of issues can sometimes take hours to work through). But general usage questions and Highslide issues are usually easier to address, and I’ll do what I can to help out.

Thanks everyone for your patience, and please remember I’m doing this for free 🙂 (donations come in very rarely).

UPDATE: I just posted a minor update, version 2.6.3:

• Shashin is now compatible with WP 3 beta 1 (WP 3 appears to automatically unserialize options, which was causing errors)
• Added support for child themes
• Can now uninstall and delete Shashin from the main plugin page (added uninstall hook for existing uninstall function)

Shashin 2.6 is now available for download at wordpress.org. I figure the end of the world is a good time to release a new version. Here’s what’s new:

• Added support for unlisted Picasa albums (finally!). You must have the PHP curl extension installed to use this feature. I believe most PHP installations include curl, but some hosting providers may need you to ask them to enable it for your account.
• Added ability to group albums by Picasa user accounts when using the [salbumthumbs] tag.
• Bug fix: the EXIF support introduced in Shashin 2.4 caused an error when syncing albums in the Windows version of mySQL. Many thanks to MC for letting me debug this on his Windows server.
• Bug fix: Shashin’s automatic album syncing was interfering with scheduled jobs from other plugins in some circumstances. This is fixed. Note that you also need WordPress 2.9.1 or higher, as this was related to a wp-cron bug in WordPress 2.9.

Also, I’ve installed the Subscribe to Comments plugin, so if you have a support question, you can get an email notification when I reply, instead of having to remember to check back.

UPDATE: I’ve made a couple bug fixes: v2.6.1 fixed another bug related to Windows servers, and v2.6.2 fixed a bug related to Google servers outside the US (see this comment for details).

Shashin 2.5 is now available for download at wordpress.org. This actually isn’t the major release I’ve been working on – it doesn’t include Flickr and Twitpic support (that’s still a work in progress). But it does include one very cool new feature: a jQuery based WYSIWYG browser for adding Shashin photos to your posts. You can now browse albums from within the editor, and click on photos to add them to your post (it will write [simage] and [sthumbs] tags for you). To use it, click the Picasa icon in the editor’s media button bar. This great feature was contributed by Sune Pedersen.

A couple usability items to point out with it:

• If you mouse over a thumbnail on the left hand side, then the right hand side will show you a larger version of it, and vice versa. I found this a little confusing at first, but it’s actually a good way of using the available screen real estate effectively
• To select a photo, just click it once. Don’t try to drag it. After you click it, you’ll see it appear under the “Selected” heading. If you change your mind and need to remove a photo that you selected, just click it, and it will be removed from the “Selected” area.

The other important new feature is that automatic album syncing is now done every 10 hours instead of once daily. This is because Picasa video URLs now expire every 11 hours, as I described previously. If you have any videos in your albums, then you will want to turn on this feature in the Shashin Settings menu.

There are also two bug fixes:

• “Next” and “previous” links for browsing album photos now work in Google Chrome and Safari (this is actually a workaround for a webkit bug)
• Album title links in the album thumbnails sidebar widget now point to the correct URL

Now back to work on version 3.0…

Sometime over the past month, Picasa made an unannounced change to how it serves videos. Previously, the Picasa RSS feeds provided URLs for videos, and those URLs worked indefinitely. Now the URLs in the RSS feeds expire after 11 hours. So if you add a video to a Picasa album, then sync the album in Shashin, it’ll work fine for 11 hours, and then it won’t work anymore. To make matters worse, re-syncing the album won’t help – Shashin doesn’t check the feed for a URL change when deciding whether to update its records, since the URLs used to never change (Shashin doesn’t just blindly update all its records when sync’ing; it checks certain fields, and then updates only if one of them changes, in order to keep sync’ing relatively fast).

The expiration time is built-in to the new video URLs, and the videos won’t play after that time passes, even if you’re logged in to Picasa. This leads me to believe that using the Picasa API wouldn’t help (even the code used to display the videos on Picasa’s own pages expires). There’s also a signature key built-in to the URL, so there’s no simple hack to the URL that’ll make it last longer.

The ability to embed videos in your own site was never a documented Picasa feature, so I really don’t have grounds to complain. But I made it a feature of Shashin, so my users do 😉 .

I’m traveling over the holidays, but I will try to get a fix released before New Year’s. The only solution I can think of is to change Shashin’s automatic once per day sync’ing feature so that it will sync every 10 hours (an hour before the expiration, to be safe). That way you’ll always have a fresh URL for embedded videos. This won’t be the major new release I’ve mentioned before – it’ll just be a fix for this and a few other minor bugs.

Note: videos added to Shashin more than a month ago still work fine, at least for now. The “old style” URLs in Shashin are still working, and – like I said – they don’t get updated when you sync. It’s only videos you may have added to Shashin within the past month that will give you a problem.