Sillyness, werd

New UI for the WP Admin area

Before you get into the nitty gritty of this little excursion, you must be informed of a couple of caveats.

First of all, this design is for me, not everyone.  Some of my compatriots on the #wordpress irc channel seemed to dig it, so I am releasing it for them really.  What does this mean to you gentle reader?  Well it means that for instance, you must keep your window at a certain width to avoid nasty wrapping issues, if you have your monitor set at 1024 X 768 then you shouldn’t have a problem.

Secondly, this includes my Overview page wp-glance, with the stats piece commented out, but if you would like to add that back in, you can download wp-glance, and follow the instructions to add the table for stats to your DB and uncomment the stats bit.

Okay, on with the show.

Well here is the first release of my new UI for WordPress.

Again before starting here, the purpose for this little experiment was to make the UI more comfortable for me, and to get rid of the stinking blue, of which I am not a fan.  Give me red baby.

Here is a screenshot:

Ok, so now on to business.  I tried to make this as painless as possible so bear with me.

1. First you need to download this archive.
2. After you have unzipped it, you will find a number of new .php files, and a couple of new images within the wp-admin folder and a new wp-admin.css file.
3. You now have one of two choices, you can either A.) backup your current copies of the .php and .css files, or you can B.) just drag and drop overwriting the current files.
4. You also need to add the images found in wp-images to your own wp-image folder.

That should be all you need to do, look for teh next version of this little endeavour that will incorporate more drastic changes to the layout of some of the screens.

Dynamic Text Fade on Page Load…

Yeah that is a serious mouthful.  But that is what this plugin does, it allows you to specify a colour value with which to fade your text from back-ground to fore-ground.

I myself don’t use this, but a buddy anatman from the WordPress irc Channel does, and wanted to be able to specify the color to begin the fade with on each page.  So I threw together this quick plugin.

I won’t go into how you set up all the various bits and pieces to get this to work for you, I would suggest looking here for that.  I am simply giving you a little help with the script.  Find the file in the usual place.

Per Post Copyright for 1.2+

You might find this a pretty extensive hack, depending on your level of experience so be warned.

I have finished the hack to give you post per post control over copyright on your WordPress powered blog.  Honestly the hardest part is adding the entries to the database where needed, other than that you just need to drop in some replacement files.

On the next page are some shots of the modified UI for the post/edit screen, and options-misc:

Here is the new post/edit screen:

And here is the new options-misc page:

Now if you are not scared away, here is a link to the files you will need, and a step by step guide on how to add fields to your WordPress Database:

• First fire up your favorite interface to your MySQL DB, my one of choice is phpMyAdmin if I am away from the server room, or CocoaMySQL if I am in the server room. In phpMyAdmin locate the wp_ (or b2, or whatever prefix)posts table and add 1 new field, anywhere really, I always put them at the end of the table:
  1. post_copyright, text, no length/value, no attributes, not null
• Then go to your options table and insert the following rows:
  1. default_copyright, option type 2, option_can_overide Y, admin user level 8
  2. use_default_copyright, option type 2, option_can_overide Y, admin user level 8
  3. use_copyright_options, option type 2, option_can_overide Y, admin user level 8
• Next backup the following files: edit-form-advanced.php, options-misc.php, template-functions-post.php, post.php, and functions.php.
• Then drop in the new versions of the above files located in the copyright folder you DLed and unzipped.

Now when you login, you should be able to go to Options>Miscellaneous and find at the bottom Use Copyrighting Features.  Now all you need to do is fill out what you want the default copyright to be, place the function call: <?php the_copyright(); ?>where you want the copyright notice to appear and you are golden.

One note, this option works just like the Geographic Tracking Features, meaning that you can modify the default on a post per post basis when you are writing your entries.

As always this tutorial and hack are fully supported by me, when I have time, so leave me a comment here and I will try and help you if you are having any problems.

A little teaser…

Here is a glimpse of something I am working on for WordPress currently:

You can see the results of it running on the site now, some of the posts are copyrighted, with sometimes widely varying licenses.

I will keep you updated.

New index page for wp-admin…

I have been working on creating a working version of mpt’s new interface mockup.

I think things are going pretty well, I have made some changes to suit my own taste, while trying to adhere to the spirit of mpt’s proposal.  I really like having this in place as the first page you see, as opposed to going straight to the write screen.

You can find a screenshot here.

The page requires my wp-stats plugin to be installed on your system, and you need to drop special-functions.php in your /wp-admin/ directory.  Everything else uses built in WP functions (you hear that photomatt? I am actually writing by the developer guidelines!)

So find the files you need in this archive.  Let me know here if you have any questions/comments.

WP-Stats

I have created a simple stats plugin for WordPress, based on Free Statistics Version 1.1.0 by Free-Webhosts.com.

Basically it is a very simple plugin that records each request to each page that the function resides on, and then uses an algorithim that predicts your traffic for the day.  I did not create a very detailed, or all-encompasing plugin, since that is not what I wanted to do.

I am going to look into hacking up a version of a new admin interface proposal by the big man mpt using this plugin to power some of the features he was proposing.

AS always you can find the hack, with instructions at the usual place.

Let me know what you guys think.

A case for CMS features…

I have been reading alot about what CMS features to add to WordPress.  One of the most requested features is the inclusion of a more robust templating system.

With the recent relaunch of blogger by parent google I think that this is an even more relevant path to follow.

The crux of the matter is that WordPress was not designed to be a CMS.  And I agree, there is no real advantage for WP to try and compete with some of the established systems out there.

However I do think that some features of the CMS would be good to fold into WP.  Case in point, a robust templating system coupled with a decent selection of pre-built templates.  This would be trivial to do really, one solution could be:

• Adding a theme folder within the wp-content folder
• Adding a Template option to the wp-admin UI, either under the actual template tab, or as a preference under options.
• This option would basically be <?php echo get_setting(‘template’); ?> .   The user would set which template they would like to use, which would just be a CSS file really.  Then when called in your index file it would output $siteurl/userselectedCSSsheet/.

This would be less than trivial and give users another reason to use this software, and might be another point in our column when Hosting Companies are looking for blogging software to install by deafult.

An interface for WP2PDF

UPDATE: I am no longer maintaining this hack.  I haven’t touched it in 2 years, and don’t intend to.  My apologies to those who come here looking for help, but I just don’t have the time to work on all the plugins and hacks that I have released over the years.  If someone else would like to take over development be my guest.

I really have begun to dig WP2PDF by theWalrus over at the www.thewalrus.info/.

Apart from a couple of small gripes from yours truly, I have found this software to be excellent and way more fun than allowed by law.  The only problem I could see was to really use it to its fullest you (the site author/admin) had to do alot of work, manually adding links here and there.

So I decided to throw together the following plugin, that currently gives your site visitors an easy to use interface to WP2PDF, allowing them and you to get more out of this great little piece of hackage.  Currently the interface is limited to creating a PDF by year, and creating one by month.  In the next version I plan to include by author and possibly by category, and probably someway to combine them, so if you want to have a PDF of all the posts that author a made in month b, under category ( c ) you could easily do that.

This plugin is pretty straightforward, all you need to do is edit the $wp2pdfpath="/pdfstuff/wp2pdf";bit and away you go.  Please note, I have my server set up to run without file extensions, so your $wp2pdfpath would be more like this:$wp2pdfpath="/pdfstuff/wp2pdf.php";Later.

Another day, another plugin…

Yeah, this is a new/reformatted hack and or plugin for WordPress.  A little while ago I released a ported hack to give you a live preview for your comments.  It has been picked up by a lot of sites, I am pretty happy about it really.

The devs have not gotten around to adding back in any kind of preview for new posts to WP(with good reason, they are pounding away at some good features.) a user on the forums wondered if my hack could implemented for the post/edit system.  Good question; so I took up the challenge and while I was at it converted the hack to a plugin to make it more user friendly.  So now I have real time preview in my comments box and the admin interface, pretty spiffy.

If you would like to tackle adding this to your WP installation, you can find the fully commented plugin file over here.

Enjoy.

Hacks, now in Plugin mode!

W00t! 

I had missed that I am listed as one of the Unofficial Five (six by some counts) Kingdoms of Hackdom on the wordpress site!  Thanks so much to Cena over at WP for the linkage, I must write more plugins!

The newest nightlies of the Wordpress Blogging System have depricated the my-hacks.php file in favor of a more user-friendly plugin system.

The new system is wonderfully implemented, for both plugin writers and users.  A plugin is really nothing more than a well formed php page that contains your custom functions; the end user then simply drops this php file in a directory labeled, get this: plugins, that resides inside the wp-content directory.  I am not sure about the wisdom of not having the plugins directory at root level, it isn’t for security since you can easily navigate to the folder.  But that is beside the point, since the system is in flux currently.

Within the archive you will find:

1. AuthorList(); (use <?php author_list(); ?> to call this function once you have the plugin installed and enabled.)
2. AuthorRSS(); (use <?php author_rss(); ?> to call this function once you have the plugin installed and enabled.)
3. MyTunes(); (use <?php my_tunes(); ?> to call this function once you have the plugin installed and enabled.)
4. RecentComments(); (use <?php last_comments(); ?> to call this function once you have the plugin installed and enabled.)

I left out my CreativeCommons(); hack for now. There is a little more involved with it, and I am trying to decide a good way to handle the need for an admin screen with it.  That is it for now, so if you are like me and enjoy living dangerously and already have a build of WP that uses plugins, then please by all means DL away and go for it.

Author RSS feeds

This hack will query your database, returning all the authors and constructing the RSS feeds for each on the fly.  You can see it in action in my menu bar to the right, under RSS for each author.

Insert this into your my-hacks.php:

function author_rss() {
global $tableusers;
$query = ("SELECT user_nicename, user_nickname from $tableusers ORDER BY user_nickname");
$result = mysql_query($query);
while ($data = mysql_fetch_row($result)) {
echo "<a href="/index/author/feed/$data[0]/rss/">$data[1]</a> ::<br />n";
}
}

Then just throw this in your index page where you would like the list to appear:

<?php author_rss(); ?>

That is all there is to it, as always here is a text file.