I’ve been very busy with my work at The Bureau, and my plugins have been a little neglected of late.

I knew the release of WordPress 5 — with Gutenberg — would necessitate a bit of updating. In the sense of letting people know that there’s no immediate plans to support Gutenberg. All sites I work on are using the Classic Editor plugin for now to avoid Gutenberg.

I’ve been prompted into action just now because Developer’s Custom Fields was completely removed from the wordpress.org repository, without letting me know first. An over-enthusiastic check for no-longer-maintained plugins falsely flagged this one, and it took a little negotiation to get it back. It’s back with a ‘disabled’ status — I can release fixes but it’s closed to new installations.

Anyway, here’s a summary of where each of my plugins are at now.

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Together with Adrian Toll, I’m starting to plan a new, mostly rewritten version of the plugin Developer’s Custom Fields.

Despite the obvious power and sophistication of plugins such as Advanced Custom Fields, we both prefer the lighter, more developer-friendly style of our own plugin. And while the proposed metadata UI for core seemed promising for a while, it seems to have stalled for now, or at the very least slowed down considerably. So, we’ve decided to revamp to give this plugin a healthy lease of life until a rival solution does a better job for us.

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Version 1.0 of the Developer’s Custom Fields plugin is in development. I’d hoped that the core Metadata UI API would have made progress enough for me to revamp DCF in light of the new core functionality, but that’s not looking likely. DCF 1.0 won’t be a major update, but I’m hoping to get some significant things sorted out.

The most important, I think, is getting the file field type working with the new (well, introduced in WordPress 3.5) media upload API. It’s pretty much there, but I’m looking for some help with it. Does anyone know the media upload API well?

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Developer’s Custom Fields 0.8.4 is now available. There’s a couple of new features:

• The abbreviate_option_labels parameter, which is true by default. This is partly a stop-gap measure for this issue, which involves posts with duplicate titles getting missed out of options populated with options_query. Being able to switch off the abbreviation of titles for the options reduces the chance of this happening.
• The sortable parameter is now availabel for multiple checkbox fields. This makes use of jQuery UI Sortable to make the checkboxes drag-and-droppable. An extra hidden field is automatically created to store the order. When a sortable field’s values are returned using any of this plugin’s functions, they are returned in the right order. The ordering can be obtained independently with the slt_cf_field_values_order() function.