After several months of tweaking and re-tweaking my patch in response to comments from various WP devs, I was confident that the patch was production-ready. The feature request has been open for over a year with a working patch for six months–at this point, I doubt it will ever be released. Maybe there are legitimate performance concerns with the patch (there aren’t any problems I’m aware of), or maybe the features are just too low in priority. The patch was my attempt at contributing back to an open-source project. After this experience, I have to say I’m a bit disappointed in the whole process. Maybe I’ll try my hand at it again, but it will be with a project other than WordPress.

In the meantime, I hope those using my List Authors widget enjoy the new features of version 2.0.

Better error handling is something I will work on in a future release. Right now, the user will not see any errors occurring from the PHP script. This is an area that needs to mature for AJAX in general. I skipped through a couple AJAX books at the book store and one didn’t even have the word “error” or “exception” in the table of contents!

Take a look at the PhotoNotes project page to see my progress so far. It’s not yet saving any changes to the database but having some working display code means that I’m half way there.

Feature 1: Allow an upper limit to the number of authors listed. Some WordPress sites have hundreds or even thousands of contributors. wp_list_authors currently would list all of them and, worse, execute an SQL statement for each author. The proposed fix could be a non-negative integer option named “count_limit.”

Feature 2: Allow sorting of the author list. This could be an option named “sort_by” with the values “name” and “post_count.”

Today I submitted a patch to WordPress Trac including both of the above features. It also changes the code to use a JOIN statement to get the author post count instead of running an SQL statement for every author. This was a necessity to prevent inconsistencies when applying the LIMIT and ORDER BY. One of the core developers is reviewing it now and, if I’m lucky, the change will be included in the next major release (version 3.0). If that happens, you can be sure I will be updating the List Authors widget to make use of the new options.

A less frequent request but one I’ve seen is for an “exclude” option with the ability to filter out certain categories of authors. There is a separate ticket for this and I might consider submitting a patch for this next.

Here are the features of my ideal alarm clock:

• Accurate to within a minute per month. Even better would be to synchronize to some time source.
• Shows date, time and day of the week (so after a rough night, I know for sure if it’s a workday or not =D )
• Easily visible during the day and at night.
• Time adjustment allows adding or subtracting hours and minutes. I hate missing the correct minute on my current alarm clock and having to hit the set button 59 more times.
• Alarm can be enabled/disabled according to the day of the week. Do I need an alarm on weekends? No. Am I so lazy that I don’t want to turn the alarm on and off every weekend? Yes.

Here are the items needed for breadboarding. This will be slightly different than the final bill of materials for the finished clock due to the breadboard power supply.

• An AVR ISP (In System Programmer) I built the USBtinyISP. SparkFun sells a slick version except that it doesn’t work well in Linux.
• Breadboard
• A reliable 5V power supply such as the 5V/3.3V breadboard power supply
• Atmel ATMega168
• 32.768kHz crystal oscillator
• 2x 22pF ceramic capacitor
• 2x 0.1uF ceramic capacitor
• Buzzer
• 3x Momentary push button switch
• 2x 10k Ohm resistor
• Photocell
• PNP transistor
• Break away male headers
• HD47780 compatible 16×2 character LCD display (see note!)
• Jumper wires (also available from Pololu)

Note on LCD display: I purchased my display off of Ebay for $5 and it works great. If you decide to use SparkFun’s display, keep in mind that it requires a resistor in series when you supply power to the backlight. The resistor is not included in my schematic because my display has the resistor built in.

The notes on the image should give you an idea of what the components look like and what they are for. You will need to study the schematic to hook everything up correctly. If you are feeling lost at this point, read through the first two SparkFun tutorials then stop back. They will walk you through setting up the breadboard’s power supply and loading code onto an ATmega168.

LCD Clock Schematic

If you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably interested in the code behind the alarm clock. It is available here. Keep in mind this is not a finished product yet so there are still some features missing. The RTC (real time clock) code is fairly solid though.

I already have a PCB layout ready in Eagle which I’m going to send out to get printed. I’m really looking forward to migrating from the breadboard to the finished product. I’ll make sure to post the result!

The List Authors widget showing two authors along with links to their respective RSS feeds.

The List Authors plugin is hosted at wordpress.org. You can find the latest features list, installation instructions, and install file there.

Update: The project page for this widget now contains the latest info and changelog.