Introducing Slugger+ by Justin Blanton
When I released Slugger, I always knew there’d be a way to make it work much more efficiently. The idea for Slugger had been bouncing around in my head for nearly a year before I actually did something about it. Then, when I finally got my hands dirty writing the plugin, I was having trouble getting it to function the way that I wanted it to (due to not being able to find a “pluggable” function in WordPress to pull it off). Then I finally “got on the horn” with Matt Mullenweg and between the two of us we figured out a way to “hack” it.
Since then I’ve always wanted to revisit it, but since it always worked so well (and no one complained) I never took the time to do so.
Enter Justin Blanton who has a few gripes with the the way I implemented Slugger and the way that it handled the inter-post slugs or post_names. Read what he has to say about what he wanted to improve:
The problem is that the plugin never actually removes this text from the content of the post, but rather filters it out each and every time the post is called (e.g., through the RSS feed, individual archive, etc.). Not only do I abhor superfluous text in my posts (what happens when I stop using Slugger in the future?), but I hate the idea that processor cycles are being spent on removing the now useless text (i.e., $post_name is already defined) each time the post is accessed. — Justin Blanton
If someone asked me what I would like to update in Slugger, I would have said the very same thing as Justin so when I saw his post about him Introducing Slugger+ in my feed reader (yes Justin, I’m a loyal subscriber) - I was very, very happy that he had found and taken the time to make such a great improvement to what has become an indispensable WordPress plugin for me when using MarsEdit (or any other application).
Justin, thanks for putting this together. I am going to change the Slugger page to refer to your plugin from now on, so that we are making sure that everyone that wants to solve this problem is getting the best possible solution.
Oh, and I’m now updating over a dozen blogs with Slugger+!