Plugins
How to get logged-in username in Hudson?
Mar 3rd
Quick background
Have you ever thought your manager keeps shelling out more on your plate other than the officially tracked tasks? Do not feel bad. You are not alone 
My manager recently asked me to clean up the build server we use for our project. To put simply, it was a mess. I ended up deciding to start from scratch. Looking around, we quickly zoomed in on Hudson. A great build/CI server. Met literally all my requirements (one of which is extensibility – with the source for Hudson available as open source, we could not have asked for more!).
After many Hudson code changes and UI customizations, we now have a great CI server up and running. One of the code changes I did is to a plugin called email-ext. This enables customizing many aspects of e-mail notification that gets triggered. Unfortunately the stock plugin missed one important thing (at least to us!) – no way to get the user name who triggered the build.
I added a new variable called BUILD_USER to email-ext. When used in the email-ext mail template, this will get replaced by the user who triggered the build. Our server is plugged in to our corporate active directory and this plugin will pick up the logged in user name.
You will find the source code and binaries down below. Note that this is based off 1.3.4.2 Hudson code and is running in our snapshot very well. YMMV and do enough testing before putting in production. Do send me any bugfixes you make, I will make them available for download.
How to use this?
Copy the HPI file to your Hudson web apps folder. Restart Hudson. Go to <your job> => Configure. Scroll down to “Editable EMail Notifications” section. Click on “content reference” help to make sure BUILD_USER is showing.
See the highlighted text shown below.
Any instances of BUILD_USER will be replaced by the current logged in user. In case of timer activated builds BUILD_USER will show “timer”. In case the build trigger reasons cannot be found out, BUILD_USER will be replaced with “<unknown>”.
Automatically create Podcasts from your posts – How To?
Jun 6th
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Sign up to Talkr or Odiogo. They offer an unique service: They allow you to automatically convert your text posts in to Audio podcasts and publish the feed. The generated MP3s are stored and served by these sites, so you don’t have to worry about bandwidth and server maintenance.
How does this magic work?
Click here to see the different components at work.
If you have ever tried the Text-to-Speech conversion programs in Windows/Mac, you know what I am talking about and need no explanation, if not read this please
Other features:
Talkr has been around since 2005 (AFAIK), Odiogo is relatively a new service. There are even plugins to integrate these services seamlessly with your Wordpress blog: Odiogo plugin for Wordpress & Talkr Plugin for Wordpress. I am sure other blogging platforms can easily be supported with little or no modification.
Personally I won’t go down this path as I prefer to hear my voice in my Podcasts, but this surely is an excellent service for those who don’t want to do everything by their own.
[Update (June 10th, 2007: Fixed all the typos. Thanks Bob for pointing out.]
WP-Mollio comment_form hook fix – HowTo?
Mar 10th
If you are using WP-Mollio theme in your Wordpress site, I’d suggest adding the comment_form hook in to your comments.php. Only if you have this statement, the plugins like “Subscribe-to-comments” will work.
How to add this hook?
- Open comments.php
- Find the lines of code shown below. You will find it near the end of the file.
<p><input name="submit" type="submit" id="submit" tabindex="5" value="Submit Comment" /></p>
</form>
<?php // if you delete this the sky will fall on your head
endif; ?>
- Add <?php do_action('comment_form', $post->ID); ?> just above </form> ending tag. Save the file.
This will allow all the plugins that depend on comment_form hook to work properly.
Wordpress plugin for Thamizmanam toolbar
Mar 8th
Update (22/03/2007): Latest version 0.9 has been uploaded. This adds support for Blogdesam aggregator.
This plugin is the outcome of spending three days with Wordpress and Thamizmanam toolbar code
This plugin inserts automagically the Pathivu toolbar code (both part1 and part2, as listed out here) at proper places. This supports both Thamizmanam and Blogdesam. The plugin adds the code only to SINGLE post pages. Note that, no template file changes are needed. Just install this plugin and everything should be fine!
How to install the plugin?
- Download the file (see the bottom of this post)
- Upload this to your <wordpress_root>/wp-content/plugins folder. NOTE: Replace <wordpress_root> with your WP installation directory.
- Unzip the file to create tbToolbar sub directory, under plugins folder. Overwrite the old files to upgrade. NOTE: Make sure tbToolbar folder is immediately under /wp-content/plugins folder.
- Go to Plugins page in your WP control panel and activate the plugin.
- Now, go to Options > Thamizmanam WP Plugin page. Here you can choose the image for showing in Thamizmanam. You can also leave this blank for the plugin to submit with the default picture.
Thats all!
Screenshots:
