It took a little over a year, but it’s finally here: Dooodl 1.1.0 1.1.1 is a fact!
What has been done?

• You can now manage the Dooodl’s that were submitted to your blog.
• I even went one better: There’s now an option that enables you to first approve Dooodls before they appear on the site.
• You can choose to get an email everytime a new Dooodl is submitted (with links to approve, disapprove or delete the new Dooodl)
• Your blog, your style: You can make the Flash Gallery and the HTML gallery look exactly the way you want (well, you can choose the colors )
• What’s better than choosing the colors of the gallery? Being able to completely edit the look of the widget so it fits into your theme perfectly!
• Don’t like the Flash gallery? Disable it in the Dooodl settings. Hurray for Flash-haters!
• Previous versions would load all Dooodls at once. That is now history: I added endless scrolling to the HTML version: People with lots of Dooodls will have less trouble showing the HTML version from now on.

I’m really excited about this release because Dooodl has now finally grown up. It’s able to fit in to your theme using the different options.
It finally fits your philosophy too as from now on you can choose to moderate them!

If you haven’t got Dooodl yet, but this release sparks some love for a fun plugin, I’d say: Go get it! It’s free and it will be a good laugh. More than 4200 downloads can’t be wrong!

Oh and by the way: I wanted to take a moment and thank every single one of you guys for downloading and installing the plugin! Seeing that many people use something I created really excites me to make things even better! Thanks for the continuous support and suggestions! You guys rock!

And as always, if you have problems, suggestions, questions: Go crazy in the comments! Drop me a line if you like it! I’d love to see how it looks/works on your site!

Enjoy!

[Update]

A few people commented they didn’t get the widget to show up in the sidebar automatically. That’s because you need to add it to the sidebar yourself. But don’t worry: It’s easy!

• Go to the WP-admin
• Go to the Appearance panel
• Select the Widgets-submenu
• Drag the Dooodl-widget into your sidebar
• Done. Ready. Finito. Party!!!

If you don’t see a sidebar in your widget-manager, it means your theme is not widget ready. In that case you can use the Dooodl PHP template tags, somewhere in your theme (yes I really thought of everything!) where you’d like the widget to show up. Use this code:

<? if (function_exists("Dooodl_widget")) Dooodl_widget(); ?>

There you go! Good luck!

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!

This is probably the biggest and most exciting project I have done for school. It consists of 84 dedicated classes (meaning I don’t count open source libs like TweenLite or my util classes). That’s a total of 5 120 lines of code or 384 kb of class files. Those are numbers that actually blew my mind once I realized what I actually did. I think this is the biggest thing I’ve created so far… And it turned out to be a way better project than I expected. I’m really proud of the result so far. I’ll be working on this over the coming weeks in order to finally launch the actual site at DrawADoodle.be.

I have some great plans on integration with the existing WordPress plugin, Dooodl. I’m really looking forward to sharing that with you.
If you feel like giving the current pre-alpha version a run, go right ahead and let me know what you think: Click!

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…

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

Plugin page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dooodl
Direct download: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/dooodl.zip
Dooodl Creator source (Flash Builder Beta): Click

If you install it, feel free to drop me a line. Feel free to post the url to your blog as well. I’d be happy to see who’s using it and what people are drawing

(And yes: If you find any bugs, do post them as comment underneath )

Have fun!