Another day, another release
My work on WPBlacklist 2.5 (yes, I upped the version to 2.5 since there are a couple of major features in there as well as a complete revamp of the installation system :p) continued much faster than I thought and I now have a fully working release which has been tested on this very blog 🙂 So what’s new you ask? Well, the major feature is the ability to automatically delete comments which are marked as spam by the WPBlacklist plugin. Now while some people would like anything that is blocked to be simply deleted without them having to bother about it, I tend to be a bit cautious about stuff which is automatically deleted. So, I added multiple options to the WPBlacklist plugin so that the administrator can specify what exactly is deleted – whether only matching IPs or IPs marked as spam sources by a real-time blacklist (RBL) or an author e-mail which is marked as spam and so on. You can turn on only the options that you are comfortable with and have the plugin automatically delete comments which match.
But what if something accidentally gets deleted even under those conditions that you really wanted, you ask. Fear not because I thought of this too :p I simply added another option which tells the WPBlacklist plugin to e-mail you with the full comment contents when a comment is automatically deleted. If you don’t want to be bothered by e-mail, all you have to do is turn the option off (it is off by default anyway :p) but if you want to be careful, then you can still get e-mails of all deleted comments but not have to bother with comment moderation on your WP install – best of both worlds? I think so 🙂
I also had to update the WPBlacklist installer since this new release made it necessary for me to do some table structure changes. When I looked at the installer, I realized how unfamiliar with WP I had been when I first started coding the WPBlacklist plugin – because it was clunky and really bad code :p So, I went back and cleaned up the code and made the installer much more simpler and also better suited to upgrades as well. Now you can run the installer to update your database structures without having the installer delete your existing data. Yes, yes, I know that by now you’re probably wondering where you can download the new release from (if you’re reading this at all, that is :p) and so, without much ado, here is the link – enjoy 🙂