Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

Since Talk Like a Pirate Day is only three weeks away, I spent some time this weekend revamping my old Fun Filters hack. The result is a new plugin for WordPress 1.2 or higher, which I call the Text Filter Suite. This version basically provides a post and comment filtering framework, which can be controlled on a per-post basis.

Download: text-filter-suite.zip or text-filter-suite.tar.gz
You can find the current version of the Text Filter Suite plugin in the WordPress Plugins Directory.

Just to demonstrate, all comments to this post will be piratized. You don’t have to do anything special. Just write your comment as you normally would.

There is more information in the README file.

 

Update 2004/09/19: Fixed a bug in the pirate filter which caused comments to break on Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Update 2005/09/13: I’ve updated the code a bit since last year to make it compatible with WordPress 1.5. Also, there are a few new pirate phrases and some new acronym expansions in tfs-acronymit. Lastly, I added the licensing information to the README (it’s GPL, if you didn’t already guess).

Update 2005/09/13 #2: Kelson Vibber discovered a problem with Comment RSS feeds, which I’ve tracked down. Unfortunately, fixing it requires modifying a core file (wp-commentsrss2.php). The problem is that if the most recent post on your site has a filter specified in the comment_filter custom post field, all comments in the site comments feed will be filtered (feeds for individual posts will only be filtered if a filter is specified on the post). This is due to to the way that the comments feed is currently generated. I’m going to try to find time to put in some patches for this in the next version of WordPress. In the meantime, you can download my patched version of the file (.phps, .txt, .zip), or re-download the TFS Plugin archive, which now includes the fixed version.

Update 2007-04-26: Some people have asked if this plugin is compatible with newer versions of WordPress. The answer is ‘yes’. At the time I write this, this site is running WP 2.1.3, and the plugin is working just fine. One day, when I can find time, I’m going to rewrite this plugin, give it a sexy web-based configuration interface, and put it into the official wp-plugins repository. More news when there’s news to report.

Update 2008-09-19: Currently running on WordPress 2.6.2, and still working fine.

Update 2013-09-19: I’m up to WordPress 2.7-alpha, and the plugin is still going strong. Huzzah!