This release continues to improve on code optimization and speedup and also introduces new features and very important bug fixes. There are still few things left to complete as planned in the 1.0 release cycle, and all that should be done with next 1.0.5 version. Roadmap contains the list of planned changes.

Main problem with last few versions was a bug with cookie chacking code. So, all blogs that were using cookies to prevent duplicated voting suffered from the same problem. I have spend few days debuging and testing this feature, and now it should be working fine. Also, among fixed bug is a rare bug that could case vote not to be saved, bug that caused rendering of invalid rating and invalid CSS.

Also, complete saving votes handling code is rewritten and it works faster now with few less mysql queries executed.
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This version brings some bugs fixed, updated translation POT file and new advanced pager for front page or archive. New pager is designed for blogs with large number of posts. Translation file is not yet completed, but contains over 95% of all string used by the adminstration panel and blog frontend.

List of all fixes and changes is in changelog file. As for the future versions, there will be an announcement by the end of the week. Since I don’t have enough time to work on new Starscape II as planned before, I will announce new development plans for Starscape 2 and Starscape 3.

New version is here. But before I go into details about new release, I would like to introduce new page on this blog. As you might have noticed, there is a page called Calendar. This page shows my public calendars from Google Calendar. And this calendars will show release dates and other important events regarding blog, wordpress plugins and themes I am working on. You can add that events to your own Google Calendars as a reminder.

And now back to GD Star Rating plugin. As you will notice, a number of new features are added, many other are improved, and bugs are fixed. I know that there are few bugs left, but important thing now is that 90% of reported bugs are not bugs at all. I will refer you again to a wiki page I have added to Google Code project website (take a look at it here) with a list of things that can cause rating plugin to stop functioning. Please, go through this list before report a bug, as I said 90% of bugs are not actually plugin bugs.

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For the last few months I have been following progress on the development of new NetBeans with PHP support. And, few days ago final NetBeans IDE 6.5 for PHP has been released.

From NetBeans official website you can choose download you need. You can download PHP only NetBeans (24MB) or you can choose full NetBeans (250MB) that includes editors for Java, PHP, Ruby, C/C++ with Apache Tomcat and GlassFish servers. You can choose Windows, Linux, Sparc or MacOS versions.

If you are using Windows as I am, to run NetBeans you need any MS Windows XP (including x64 edition), MS Windows Vista or any MS Windows Server. You also need latest Java RunTime installed. I have tested NetBeans 6.5 with both 32bit and 64bit (with both 32bit and 64bit JRE) Windows XP, and it works without a problem.

I will describe the process of using NetBeans for developing for WordPress, and also some interesting features this IDE has to offer.

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I have finally got a little time to update Starscape theme. This new version brings few small bugs fixed, and two new features. I have added direct integration support for GD Star Rating comment review rating, and support for upcoming WordPress 2.7 thread comment model. Also, I have made some changes to CSS and added classes for rendering image captions.

Next version will be released with WordPress 2.7, and will have more GD Star Rating features integrated, and also will improve on comment threading.