Here it is - Referrer Detector 2.0

As said yesterday, I’ve managed to update my Referrer Detector plugin to its second major release. During the last week, it was soooo great to see that despite of all the bugs and limitations, my plugin has been warmly welcomed. And never in my (blogging) life have I had to moderate that many of comments. Thank you all, for criticisms and compliments alike!

For, the most significant change compared to previous versions is the admin (aka Options) panel. With the help of the great jQuery UI library, all the options are now divided into much much clearer tabs!

Tabs

Then, from the suggestion of iTalal, I’ve added an option to specify a list of “excluded” URLs. If the user is coming from one of these URLs, the greeting box won’t be shown. This comes handy with, for an example, Google Reader. Please note that the URLs should come in a separated list, each following the same rule with the entry URL - no “http://www” prefix.

Excluded URLs Option

The next visible change is, now it’s 100% AJAXed - well, it was not with the Generic Options, but now even that conservative old guy is convinced by the AJAX power ;) Now you won’t need to reload the page - ever!

Generic Options Saving

Then, we have some more improvements under the hood:

  • As Study Babes suggested, there should be an option to display the welcome message in the theme itself. Well, not until now - now you can place this template tag somewhere in the theme files (most likely index.php):
    <code>&lt;?php if (function_exists('referrer_detector')) referrer_detector(); ?&gt;</code>

    In case you ever wonder, there is at most one greeting box each page. With that said, this template tag has the highest priority, when the lower goes to the “Automatically add to every post blah” settings, and the least is for the custom tag {referrer-detector} if any in the post.

    There is one drawback with the template tag though. Since in such a case, the greeting box is shown in a page with many different posts at once, the tags such as {author} and {categories} become ambiguous. So, please keep in mind that if you use template tag, only the most common {title} and {url} are available.

  • Some of the javascript files are now packed to save some bandwidth and loading time.

That’s all! And is it redundant to add that you can, as usual, grab it at the WordPress Codex?

  • Now this plugin is perfect, I have nothing else to ask for :P

    I’ll write a post about it soon. Thanks again :)

  • Hi ! Congrats for this plugin. It is very useful.
    Nevertheless, I have a problem using it when I try to add new entries. For ‘http://viadeo.com’, I have put ‘viadeo.com’ in the box but it seems it do not recognize link from viadeo.com…

  • Hello Boris,
    I’ve tried myself with viadeo.com and see that it works. What was the link that you came from (and didn’t see the greetings on your site)?

  • phoenix: I came to my blog from my Viadeo’s profile where I put a link.

    In Referrer Detector I have put ‘Viadeo’ as name and ‘viadeo.com’ as URL

  • Great plugin, adding and deleting entries is just great. It is working quite well, but I want to remove the icon image, at the admin I have tried to set display icon to no but its doing nothing. What can I do?

  • Used the template tags and it’s working - except for Google. Did a few searches, clicked on the result links from Google and it doesn’t say anything.

    I tested Digg and Twitter quickly - both worked.

  • Great plugin, I love the functionality!

    One problem I’m having, however, is that it is forcing my home page (which displays several posts) to not be valid HTML. I even turned off both of the Automatic settings in Generic Options and used the template tag with no luck. An individual post validates fine, but not the home page.

    Any suggestions?

  • Awesome plugin, I just added it to my blog and it works great !

    Many thanks :)

  • Hi mate!

    I’ve installed your plugin, but seems don’t work…
    I have 2 javascript error:
    - element.dispatchEvent is not a function
    - element.style is undefined

    I use last version of WP.
    Any help?

    Regards.

  • Hi shecky,
    Seems like these errors didn’t come from Referrer Detector, but maybe from conflicts between the installed plugins. Do you suspect on any?

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