Countdown Timer v2.0, Now with v2.01 goodness!

The times they are a-changin’.

This post seems to be older than 15 years—a long time on the internet. It might be outdated.

Update: There was a bug in the initial 2.0 version that required the plugin to have PHP5 or greater. This has now been fixed and it works with PHP4 and PHP5. Thanks to Jim Lynch for bug report.

Well, I finally managed to push Countdown Timer v2.0 out the door. It’s a bit later then I wanted, but it’s out and that’s all that matters for now. The biggest update for v2.0 is the ability to have the time automatically update using some Javascript. The idea for this has actually been around for a while and credit for it goes to Tobias (see: Ultimate Countdown Timer; 1-Up’d by a 14 Year Old). I was hoping I could use a lot of Tobias’ code, however I had changed a lot between then and now.

During the development phase, I wrote some code that basically took a look at what value the timer was at and then subtracted one second from that. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that this method would not work. Because there are a variety of options in what units of time are displayed, screen scraping and then recalculating would have been pretty cumbersome. It also meant that I had two ways of calculating the time (the first way was the PHP-based fuzzyDate function I wrote, the second would have been this monstrosity). So I did what any code programmer does and copied myself. I converted the PHP-based fuzzyDate function into Javascript and then passed the needed values to the JS function. Voila!

In any event, here’s the changelog:

  • Updated plugin description line
  • Rearranged text in the installation notes to emphasize using the widget rather then the code
  • Fixed a bug that crashed the plugin if no dates were present (a PHP 5 problem??)
  • Implemented the ‘register_activation_hook’ function rather then the old way
  • Changed the way DB updates are handeled. Instead of having a specific update regimine for each version, the plugin will only update an option field if it doesn’t exist (if it exists, but is blank, it will NOT update…as it shouldn’t).
  • Updated fergcorp_countdownTimer_fuzzyDate with another variable so that the real target date is always known.
  • Removed code dealing with updates since WP 2.3 now does this automatically
  • Bug fix. Widget title isn’t saveable due to a programming error. Thanks to Michael Small for the catch.
  • Renamed some functions from afdn to fergcorp
  • Added JavaScript function for JS countdown
  • Tabbed $afdnOptions array to make it more readable
  • Fixed strtotime typo
  • Brought time display inline with current WordPress practice. This fixes the dreaded timezone glitch.
  • Strip non-sig zeros option added
  • Fixed bug where “No dates present” would _not_ show if the data was returned instead of echo’d
  • Renamed to $getOptions to $fergcorp_countdownTimer_getOptions to avoid clashing

Read more or download version 2.01!

Note: Comments moved and closed. Please leave future comments, questions, pleads for help, etc on the Countdown Timer page.

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