Plugin Contest Winners

MT 3 plugin winners announced. Congrats to Jay and the other winners! Now all they need is a plugin that corrects non-utf-8 characters. (Validate that page. It’s a very tricky problem in any language.)

10 thoughts on “Plugin Contest Winners

  1. Now all they need is a plugin that corrects non-utf-8 characters.

    No.

    Since their content is Windows-1252 (i.e., ISO-8859-1, with a couple of curly single-quotes sprinkled in), then they either need to transcode it to UTF-8 (if they insist on serving it as UTF-8 encoded), or use my plugin to correct the stray Windows-1252 characters, and serve their pages as ISO-8859-1.

    For some reason, many developers, including — apparently — 6A seem to think that slapping a “charset=utf-8” declaration is all they need to do to make their software I18N-aware. If that were all it took, everybody’s software would be I18N-aware by now.

  2. I don’t believe this.

    To pick some random pages, no it doesn’t.

    Not only does it not handle these character-encoding issues, but you know that it doesn’t, since you just went through and cleaned up your main page by hand.

    And switching to UTF-8 (as this page has done) doesn’t help.

  3. Jaques, I’m not even using MT Textile on my site. In fact, I’m not even using MT. I used to use MT, and the plugin, and it kept every one of my pages 100% valid. I didn’t just go and clean up any of my pages by hand, if any page on my site is valid, it’s only because it doesn’t happen to contain any non-SGML characters.

  4. So anyway, if you actually read the page I linked to:

    char_encoding
    Set to 1 to encode special characters to HTML entities. If you’re outputting utf-8 data, this can be set to “˜0′ to output plaintext instead. In fact, if you set your PublishCharset for Movable Type to utf-8, it will effectively set this setting to “˜0′. Otherwise, the default value is 1.

    And by doing so, it kept every single one of my pages (back when I used the plugin — not now, since I don’t use the plugin anymore) 100% valid.

  5. Not only have I looked at that page, I’ve looked at Brad’s code.

    And, no, it doesn’t handle these encoding issues. It does make a call the HTML::Entities if you set char_encoding to “1”. But that’s it.

    Sorry, but Textile (Brad’s plugin, or the WP version thereof) may be useful for some things, but this isn’t one of them.

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