Mon Havre de Liberté

The second release of Jabber Feed is out today. It has been greatly improved though I will still have some work on it. Now all nodes are created automatically by the plugin when you configure it. Hence it will “tell” you if your Jabber account is wrong or if you don’t have the rights to create the node.

The posts will be published to a subnode ‘posts‘. So people can subscribe to this node in order to receive only notifications about new posts.
Comments are published under the subnode ‘comments/{id}‘ where ‘{id}’ is to be replaced by the post’s id. Hence people can subscribe to the comments of a single post. By subscribing to ‘comments’ node only, you will receive all comments, as long as the correct option to receive items of subnodes as well is set (unfortunately this option is not understood by ejabberd, the server which I made tests with, and the one of jabber.org. I don’t know for the other server softwares) in your subscription.

Of course we cannot ask people to “know” all this. This is why autodiscovery links are automatically set on every pages (you can subscribe to comments on a specific post only, to all posts, all comments, etc.). I also provide 2 templates to generate these links (either autodiscovery links for html header, or just simple ‘a’ tags, or even just bare XMPP urls) in order for you to use them as you like in your theme. For instance, I added a ‘a’ link to the post and comment nodes at the bottom of my test page, and a ‘a’ link above the comments for subscribing to comments of a post.

One of the other main points I improved since first version is that now, all nodes are created automatically for you! The blog admin don’t need to do anything, he doesn’t have to know XMPP and how it works. She or he simply has to know a pubsub server and choose an unchosen node on it.
You can also have a look at the improved configuration page which creates the nodes and tests the Jabber login (JID) when you aknowledge the configuration with the “Update” button.

To conclude this all, I will say that I am pretty happy of this all. This is still not perfect. Some details have to be improved, or even fixed (I keep a todo list you can read in the wordpress repository). But this is a nice step since first version and soon technically close to perfection from a publishing system point of view. :p Now I will work on higher priority on the syntax of the sent message because it is really ugly (and without content processing, it will probably fail with some special html character or tags). I especially want to process the posts and the comments’ content to make them XHTML-IM compliant before sending it. Note that I will probably provide this new version very soon (in a week, if my mind don’t get disturbed by other stuffs).

More information, as well as the plugin itself, are foundable on the Wordpress repository website.

Any feedback is more than welcome.

P.S.: note that I don’t even use the plugin here (in fact yes, I enabled it but don’t show it by using the templates in my theme!) because ejabberd (the server software I use, and one of the most famous. For instance jabber.org also uses it) has a big bug on the pubsub implementation which prevents from creating and especially subscribing to a node from a JID of another server! So this is not a useful PubSub implementation if people cannot subscribe (or only people on the same server as you, which is a huuuuge limitation).
Yet I was told Tigase has currently a very good pubsub implementation (close to 100%). So I will make some tests soon (but first I have to install it, unless someone can forward me to one where I can run tests to spare time?) with it and maybe change my server for Tigase if it is really better.

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