W-Shadow.com

After two weeks of full-time work on Broken Link Checker, I am delighted (and somewhat relieved) to say that the next version of the plugin is almost ready to go. The upcoming release will include many frequently requested features like email notifications, checking comment links, Cron support and better handling of false positives.

If you’re feeling courageous, you can download the in-development version and try out the new features right now, bugs and all. The final & reasonably stable version should be ready in a week or so.

You can find a full list of new features and changes below. Any user suggestions not on this list won’t get implemented for v. 0.9, but they still remain on my to-do/idea list for the plugin, and may well be realized eventually.

What’s New

The big changes :

• Checking comment links.
• Email notifications.
• Run the link checker when you’re not logged in (via Cron).
• Recheck selected links via Bulk Actions.
• Suspend checking if the server is overloaded.
• The confusing “Discard” button is gone; replaced by a “Not broken” action link.
• Better handling of false positives. If you mark a link as “Not broken”, the plugin will memorize the server response that made it think the link was broken, and treat the link as working unless/until it gets a different response when it checks that link again.
• Support for custom checking algorithms, e.g. for dealing with YouTube and RapidShare links (not implemented yet, but the required scaffolding is there).

The minor stuff :

• Additional icons (from FamFamFam) for the link table.
• The “Delete sources” action asks for confirmation before deleting anything.
• Long HTTP headers in the log no longer cause the “Details” section to expand ridiculously.
• FTP, mailto:, javascript: and other links with unsupported protocols now show up in the “All links” table.
• The rarely used “Exclude” link is gone. You can still exclude links by adding the URL or domain to the exclusion list in settings.
• Editing links via the plugin’s interface creates new post revisions (where applicable), so you can revert the changes if something goes wrong.
• Searching by link text now uses simple pattern matching, not full-text search.
• Added Czech translation.
• Requirements upped to WP 2.9+

To Do

Things that need to be done before the final release :

• Test and tweak email notifications.
• Test and tweak load limiting.
• Update localization files.
• Make “Trash” links use AJAX, where possible.
• Obsess over the wording of error messages.
• Code clean-up.