After about a month of working on the plugin around 20 hours a week I’m happy to announce the release of wp-click-track 0.6. This release includes a couple small bugs as well as one really bitch of a bug that’s been with the system since the release of 0.1. To make it worthwhile to upgrade there’s also a few features that have been requested and a couple I’ve personally been wanting for a while.

I have to admit, I didn’t think this update would take as long to deploy as it did. I don’t have a day job so, my time being free, I honestly thought I’d be done in a couple days. Lesson: estimates are hard even for your own projects.

One of the reasons was caused by the addition of a dedicated menu instead of the single entry point. Because the functionality has grown to the point of a full CRUD program the old menu style just wasn’t that useful anymore. Making the change required paying down a lot of built up technical debt in the system.

Another new feature is a search system for the links. I’ve been planning on this one for a while but because there was changes to the database, and I wasn’t really confident in deploying those changes until now, I’ve been sitting on the addition. The system will attempt to convert  the link table to the MyISAM format and, if it can’t, will use a basic LIKE search syntax as a fallback. This should really help those with bunches of links.

And, much to the delight of many I’m sure, this release includes a couple sidebar widgets for making the top links and “todays” click count data public. These work as you would expect a widget to work; they’ll have to be activated from the Appearance->Widget administration interface as any other widget should.

Finally, as far as the features and additions go, the interface has been changed to match the native WordPress interface. This should keep the experience of looking at the reports a little more fluid and less jarring.

The best thing about this release isn’t a feature but a single bug fix. For a while now (too long really) there’s been an issue that could keep certain links from being tracked accurately if the link didn’t open in a new window on FireFox 2&3. This was a bitch of a bug that was difficult to isolate and fix; but it’s finally, finally, dead.

In anticipation of 0.7, which focus primarily on l10n and i18n, 0.6 is ready to be localized. (BTW, if anyone is willing to localize the plugin into a different language please drop me a line.)

As always please report any bugs or issues with wp-click-track; I’ll get them fixed ASAP.