Archive for April, 2009

ScoreRender 0.3.0 Released

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

After 8 months, here comes another major release. Highlight of this shiny release include:

  • Philip’s Music Writer notation support.
  • IE PNG Fix has been incorporated, which provides translucent PNG support for IE 5.5 and 6.x. No more whining when this plugin detected that your readers are using IE 5/6. Thanks to Angus Turnbull for the terrific yet easy to use IE filter!
  • Zero Clipboard has been incorporated, which provides cross platform copy and paste function using Adobe Flash. No more whining again, but it’s Mozilla/Firefox and all other non-IE browsers instead. Oh yes, JavaScript and Flash must be there, of course. Thanks to jhuckaby for this great flash helper!
  • Better support of installation on web hostings. This has been described in another post.
  • Rendering also depends on ‘unfiltered_html‘ WordPress capability.
  • Functions and files are completely refactored, so admin page is only included when needed, and PHP classes no longer access global variables as it has been done before.

As usual, please visit installation page on how to install the plugin. You will need to install extra required programs for this plugin to function as well, and they are sometimes not as easy as installing the plugin itself. If you managed this part, you can visit notation introduction page to start publishing your blog with music content!

Recent direction of ScoreRender

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

Looks like another half year has passed without any significant improvement on ScoreRender… actually not really. There is some work behind the scene, but not announcement yet.

  1. A certain user has been facing problem with hosted web sites, so it looks like there IS need to make it work with web hosts — to be specific, ScoreRender needs to cope with the case when PHP functionas are disabled due to security reasons. It shouldn’t be hard. The hardest part is how it can work with older ImageMagick and other related software. I don’t see any solution yet.
  2. IE6 PNG image transparency seems not as dead-end as I thought. With the image filter published by TwinHelix, it looks trivial to add the support for IE6. At least way better than the big fat warning with current releases.