blog.NOVALISTIC

No, there will be no revamp of the current design because I simply find it too awesome to be replaced (as yet). However, to harness WordPress 2.7′s new theming features, especially threaded comments, which I myself will take a while to adjust to, I will be substantially refactoring the theme and release blog.NOVALISTIC 2.1 as soon as WordPress 2.7 RC1 is out the door.

I have a feeling this design will live through the launch of NOVALISTIC 4.0 “Sarathos”.

dev.NOVALISTIC and Thistle

Like what will become blog.NOVALISTIC 2.1, Thistle 1.1 will also be worked on to welcome WordPress 2.7 and I suspect Thistle should be out at around the same time frame as when RC1 arrives. Don’t worry though: rest assured that Thistle 1.1 will remain backward compatible with WordPress ≤ 2.6, and you can upgrade painlessly. Of course, dev.NOVALISTIC’s WordPress setup will be upgraded to the release candidate, and the theme will be updated.

Potassium

Potassium will be updated, as Potassium 1.0.6, to go with Sandbox 1.7, the version of Sandbox that should be made for WordPress 2.7.

Phi

Phi is not affected in any way by WordPress 2.7. Although that means Phi is already WordPress 2.7-ready, that doesn’t mean I’ll only support use of it on WordPress 2.7 when I release it. All versions from 2.0 onwards are supported. I believe Phi will be ready for release shortly after 2.7 rolls out.

I tried a few plugins like WP-Syntax and SyntaxHighlighter Plus, however they were too complicated and feature-rich for my needs, and recent versions of WP-Syntax, which I’d been using for the past year, were beginning to mess with my styles. That annoyed me real good. Plus, GeSHi colors were getting a little boring for me.

There was WP-Syntax Colorizer, but it didn’t quite satisfy me.

That does it, I thought. So I set out to put together a simple plugin which would fulfill my needs, using PHP’s humble highlight_string() function (PHP manual page).

And Phi was born.

I might release Phi soon. I believe there are others out there who share my opinion about the bigger syntax highlighting plugins. Besides, this is my first, so for additional kicks I’d like to see what it’s like to be a proud developer of my very own WordPress plugin (heh).

Here’s an excerpt of Phi’s source code, highlighted using Phi itself of course:

Example 1: Phi’s source code, highlighted using Phi

<?php
    
    // PHP 4 coughs up <font> tags - clearly highly undesirable behavior
    if ( version_compare(phpversion(), '5.0.0', '<') ) {
        $php = preg_replace(
            array('@<font color="(.+?)">@', '@</font>@'), 
            array('<span style="color: $1">', '</span>'), 
            $php
        );
    }
    
?>

See also, at dev.NOVALISTIC, Phi in action.