Doodling evolved

The few people that follow me on Twitter have probably seen me tweet about an upcoming site called ‘Draw A Doodle’. I could try to explain everything about what I’m planning to do, but why bother if I could just save you 8 minutes and just show you what I want to really to create?

One of my latest school assignment was to create a site where users can create news-content. (Me being way too excited to have actually paid attention, I read users should be able to create new content… Turns out my lecturers really wanted NEWS content… ) In this assignment, I saw the perfect opportunity to create the basics of the Draw A Doodle project. So I did…

I really put in a lot of effort into detail and animations. Nearing the end of the deadline I had to cut some corners… I had to leave out the layer-rearranging system in the Doodle Creator, I didn’t get to take care of all tab-indices, I had to skip the scrollbar for the users-list and the comments-lists, etc.

Oh god… I was going to cut right through the chase and show you the project! How did I end up telling the story of my life again? Well anyway: Pictures!

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Dooodl misery!

Let me start this post with a big…

I really screwed up yesterday. I updated the Dooodl plugin and commited it to SVN. After having done that I wanted to wait until the changes reflected on the Wordpress site (which sometimes takes a few minutes). However I had to go over to Ward for dinner, so I took my laptop…

When arrived there I checked the site back and saw the changes. I updated the plugin on my site immediately using the WP-plugin auto-update functionality. That’s when all hell broke loose…
I saw that all the doodle-images on my site were gone, but the userdata (in the database) remained. When checking the FTP I realized what happened… The images are saved inside the plugin folder in a folder called ‘doodls’. Once you let Wordpress update the plugin automatically it tells you it ‘removed the old version of the plugin‘, before it ‘upgraded the plugin succesfully‘. It actually removes everything in that directory. I did NOT know that! I expected the plugin to replace all the existing files with new files and add the missing files/folders. And that’s why everything saved by the plugin was was lost once updated…

In my case I immediately lost about 120 doodles you guys submitted. Lucky for me I took a backup only half an hour before running the upgrade . In the end I only lost 11 images. I hope I’m the only one who ran into this misery.

But now…
There’s a new version online (1.0.5) (1.0.6  featuring smaller brushes ) which will not have that issue anymore. But before running off and installing this version please take a look at this and please be absolutely sure to have a backup of your doodles before installing ANY other version of the plugin…

1. Before updating, download the /wp-content/plugins/dooodl/doodls/ folder. This folder contains all doodles your users saved. If you don’t, you will lose all images your users saved.
2. Create a folder in /wp-content/uploads/ and name it ‘doodls‘.
3. Upload the images to this(/wp-content/uploads/doodls/) folder.
4. Now you can upgrade the new version of the plugin.

Again: I’m terribly sorry about all this and I really hope you didn’t lose (too much) of your doodles. I already tested 1.0.6 and it’s working perfectly. If you safely copy/backup the folder with doodles (using the steps above) then you should be safe

Having said all this…

If you got any feedback or information on how Wordpress updates itself and plugins, do let me know. I really wouldn’t like running into this kind of trouble again…

Dooodls for everyone!

A few days ago I presented the Dooodle application I built. You guys created some cool doodles and I totally love it!

But it’s still an independent application hacked into Wordpress using basic widget.  That means I can’t just share the code so you can use it too on your website (since you’ll have to set up a database, fill in config files, etc… Boring stuff). So yesterday I decided to compact this into a handy Wordpress plugin.
And this is what I did: I give you Dooodl!

[UPDATE] Mark asked me to share the source of the Dooodl Creator App, so I did Feel free to send me links to your own creator. I might add different creators to the plugin, and let you choose in the WP-admin which one you’d like your visitors to use

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