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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Last few weeks I have spend a lot of time fixing GD Star Rating bugs, and even more time trying to figure out bugs in other WordPress plugins. JavaScript code is very easy to break, and in most cases it will not going to affect the page rendering, only some of the elements.

People notice GD Star Rating stops functioning and they assume that the problem is with GD Star Rating. Rating is interactive feature and when it stops working, it is the first thing blog visitors see. But in most cases some other plugin uses JavaScript and when that stops working, all JavaScript stops working.

The best thing is to check each plugin you install on you blog to see if this plugin breaks something. To see JavaScript problems you need to have Mozilla Firefox borwser (version 2 or 3) and Firebug plugin. Firebug also have it’s own plugins like Firecookie. You can install that too.
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All plugin and theme authors that added multilanguage support to their plugins and themes, should provide valid POT file with all needed translation strings. This is not required, but it saves a lot of time for the translators.

Translation process needs to produce two files, one with extension MO and the other PO. MO file is the file with actual translation, and the PO is more of a template file that looks like POT but has translation string in it. This PO file is needed if you later need to change and update translation.

There are different tools you can use to translate POT file in PO/MO files, and this post will be about POEdit. This is free and multi platform program that works on Windows, Linux and MacOS. I have noticed that POEdit is not working with plural translations as it should, at least with the ones used by WordPress.

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Since I have started developing my ‘GD Pages Navigator’ widget plugin, I wanted to upgrade it so it can support more then one instance on a page. Unfortunatly there are limited resources available for that task, and almost no info about it in the official documentation. There are plugins that use different methods of achiving this, but best method is the one used by plugins build into Wordpress.

So, my starting point was ‘widget.php’ file where this default widgets are located. They also provided a short example of multi instance widget at the end of this file. This example in is good, but it has few errors (copy-paste errors mostly). This function is in the sample code class

I have decided to walk you throught the process of creating a widget that will support more then one instance. This example will show you how to work with different types of settings and it will provide you with some practicle code snippets you can use in your own plugins. Tutorial will be based on my ‘GD Pages Navigator’ plugin. This widget supports multiple instances from the version 3.0.0.
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