Simpler Plugins Blog

In this release of Simpler CSS, I’ve fixed a problem in the regular expression that would strip out all external references, breaking background-image: url(http://example.com/image.jpg) declarations. Another issue that was fixed was a <td> tag that wasn’t properly closed.

In Version 0.3, no significant code changes were made, but the plugin’s metadata has been edited to reflect its compatibility with up to WordPress 2.9-rare (trunk version).

Version 0.2b of the Simpler CSS plugin provides new functionality.

• Default CSS setting / default text
• Cleaner cleaning
  • Quotes in CSS no longer escaped
  • @import and CSS comments are now stripped

A new default CSS setting shows on the options page for new users who have just discovered the custom CSS feature. By default, introductory text is shown to let users know what the plugin does. This default text can be edited in the plugin file — very useful for WordPress µ hosts.

Default text on Simpler CSS options page

Version 0.2b also fixes a problem where CSS properties that have quotes, such as font-family: "Times New Roman", Georgia, serif; may be escaped by the PHP function htmlspecialchars(). ENT_NOQUOTES is now used so that quotes in CSS code are not erroneously escaped.

This new plugin uses Perl regular expressions to strip out @import rules (to prevent the loading of external stylesheets — useful only for WordPress µ hosts that want to limit their users’ capabilities) and CSS comments (to reduce output size). Further filtering will be added in future versions in a way that allows them to be disabled or enabled.

(We’re skipping the 0.2 release because that one had a link to the old Simpler Plugins site, which has been switched to this blog.)

Version 0.1 of Simpler CSS was released today after the project was added to the WordPress Plugin Directory.

This is the initial version; version 0.2 will be coming within the next few days, allowing for a WordPress.com-style default message and regular expression-based filtering.