Archive for March, 2009

You may have noticed that things have been a little quiet on the blog front lately, apart from a few updates on new WordPress Plugins we have been creating.

The reason is that this has been taking up most of our time. But it is time well spent, as we have managed to produce 4 quite useful (we think!) WordPress Plugins in a little over 6 weeks.

You can see the fruits of our labour, at our WordPress.org Plugin directory page.

We will probably not be producing any new Plugins for WordPress, at least not for a while. But, we will be adding some nice new features to our existing Plugins. Any suggestions by the way, be sure to let us know!

We do love WordPress though, it is a great environment for developers to get their teeth into, and features a rich API to enable programmers to create some really great additions to the core WordPress Blog.

We will be getting back to C# development over the next couple of months, and also concentrating on SEO/SEM. This field is moving along rapidly and a site can really benefit from a deep understanding of the current technologies. If you have any requirements in this field than we would be happy to discuss them with you.

We already have clients who need a dedicated SEO/SEM solution and are working with them to enhance their web presence. Our next client could be you, so please do get in touch if you have any ideas you need help with.

Watch out for further announcements soon!

Ok, we have another WordPress Plugin for you! Version 1.0 of our ‘Quick Code’ Plugin has been released on the WordPress Plugin directory this morning. This Plugin allows you to edit HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL in the admin area of your blog, and see the results displayed directly on the same page! This is very useful for testing code fragments.

There have been many times recently that I have needed to test out a quick snippet of code, but had nowhere to easily place it to see the output. What I have had to do up until now is create a ‘test’ Plugin and insert echo commands to view output. Of course, as anyone who has developed Plugins knows, the results of sending data output with the echo command can be unpredictable depending on where you enter the command in your Plugin code. Now all you have to do is to simply enter the code in the ‘Quick Code’ edit box and see the results displayed immediately!

There is another useful feature, which is the usage of three external code files that are automatically included by the Quick Code Plugin when the Plugin admin page renders. These are:

• JavaScript file that is included in the admin head, and can be used to store JavaScript functions for reference from the main code edit box.
• Style sheet CSS file, included in the admin head, that can be used to store commonly used blocks of CSS code.
• PHP functions file, included directly before the main code output box, so that commonly used PHP functions can be stored and called from the main file.

See our Quick Code page for more information, or go to our Quick Code Plugin page on the WordPress.org Plugin directory.

Our To Do List Plugin has just had its first significant upgrade.

The most significant changes are:

• Support for multiple users. Every user of the blog can maintain their own list! Plugin automatically monitors who is logged in and displays the appropriate to do list.
• To Do List is now available as a dashboard widget for convenience, and accessibility.
• List saved in the database not as a text file.
• When a user is deleted from the blog, their to do list is deleted too automatically.

Here is a screen shot of the latest version of the To Do List WordPress Plugin:

You can download the latest version of the To Do List Plugin from our WordPress Plugin directory page here.

I noticed from the documentation that you are supposed to be able to hook into the new WordPress 2.7 admin short cuts menu (but it doesn’t say how)!

Ok, so after a little digging around in the WordPress core, the admin-header.php file (in the wp-admin folder) contains the code for the admin header.

In the admin-header.php file there is a section of code:

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<div id="wphead-info">
 <div id="user_info">
  <p>< ?php printf(__('Howdy, <a href="%1$s" title="Edit your profile">%2$s'), 'profile.php', $user_identity) ?>
  < ?php if ( ! $is_opera ) { ?><span class="turbo-nag hidden"> | <a href="tools.php">< ?php _e('Turbo') ?></a></span>< ?php } ?> |
  <a href="<?php echo wp_logout_url() ?>" title="< ?php _e('Log Out') ?>">< ?php _e('Log Out'); ?></a></p>
 </div>
 < ?php favorite_actions(); ?>
</div>

continue

Just another quick update (I must be on a roll today!). We have released version 1.0 of our Admin Log WordPress Plugin that keeps track of pages accessed in the admin area. It also logs who accessed them, and at what time (useful if multiple people have access to your blog and you want to know who is up to what).

See our Admin Log page for more information, or go to our Admin Log Plugin page on the WordPress Plugin directory.

Just a quickie..

The To Do List Plugin has had a couple of minor releases since the first one a couple of days ago. Here are the changes made:

• To Do List now located under the Dashboard top level menu. Makes more sense to put it here.
• Changed the way the Plugin gets the path to the To Do List Plugin folder. Now using ‘WP_PLUGIN_DIR’ constant rather than ‘PLUGINDIR’.
• Changed message when update button clicked. Used to display ‘Options Saved.’, now displays ‘To Do List Updated.’.
• Removed test code that shows magic quotes status.

You can get the latest version of the To Do List Plugin from our WordPress Plugin directory page here.

Our latest WordPress Plugin – ‘To Do List’ 1.0 has just been completed, and is available now for download.

It is compatible with the latest version of WordPress 2.7.1, and allows Blog owners to keep track of common tasks, by filling in the information in a text field in the Plugin Options page. This is then saved to a text file when the update button is clicked

The Plugin automatically checks to see if magic quotes are turned on, on your server. If so, the text entered in the To Do List text box is automatically stripped of escape characters (backslashes). Otherwise the text is left unchanged.

The To Do List Plugin has now been uploaded to the WordPress Plugins Directory. Also check out our To Do List page for more information on this Plugin.

As always, let us know what you think!

New version of our profanity filter available. To see what’s new in this version click here for more information.

Direct download WP Content Filter 1.2 from the WordPress Directory.

Update: This post is followed up with more information here.

The new admin interface in WordPress 2.7 is a great success, and improves the admin area navigation by leaps and bounds from WordPress 2.6. It certainly reduces the number of mouse clicks needed to move around from section to section, and menu items are more accessible than they were before.

New to WordPress 2.7 are two API’s that are very useful. Firstly, you can now add your own custom items to the admin dashboard, you can see more information here in the Dashboard Widgets API. You can also now add your own Plugin options to existing parts of the admin panels, rather than having to create your own custom admin option pages from scratch. This is controlled by the Settings API.

One thing I haven’t been able to find though, is how to access, and add your own custom menu items to, the Shortcuts menu, in the header bar of the WordPress 2.7 admin area. This would be an excellent place to add to the Shortcuts menu and to add other ‘quick access’ type menus.

New quick access ‘Shortcuts’ menu in WordPress

I have a few other WordPress Plugins currently in development that would specifically benefit from being in the admin header area, but have yet to track it down. Perhaps it is buried somewhere in the new Settings API. Does anyone know where?

I am sure I have seen somewhere in the WordPress Plugin developer documentation, a mention of hooking into the Shortcuts menu. But, it neglected to state how!!

It has been an enjoyable experience delving into the inner workings of WordPress of late. And it has been during the development of one of our recent projects, the ‘WP Content Filter’, our first WordPress Plugin by the way , that we have come across some unanticipated subtleties.

For instance, any WordPress Plugin is free to access hooks that are exposed by the core WordPress code. Well, this is the whole point isn’t it? To be able to customise the functionality of your blog site over the default WordPress installation.

However, what happens when two Plugins access the same filter hook to, say, do some custom formatting of post comments. If there is an overlap in two (or more) Plugins functionality then it is likely they will all want to access a common WordPress Plugin hook. In this case which one is run first? Is there anyway to force you Plugins code to run before (or after) any others? Would that even be ethical. Or, is it completely ambiguous and decided by the Plugin attributes (such as the order that Plugins were installed on your WordPress blog).

As far as I am aware there are no hooks exposed by WordPress to control this. Perhaps more unpredictable is the behaviour resulting from action Plugin hooks. Plugin code running on a WordPress ‘event’ for more than one Plugin could have very strange results, and the likely culprit for conflicts between Plugins.

Perhaps in the future of WordPress there could be some way to allow the user of Plugins (i.e. site administrators) to be able to set which Plugins have priority over other Plugins. This could be handled in two ways: continue