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Wordpress Dashboard Editor

Of the entire website the Dashboard is seen by administrators the most, but it is the hardest part of Wordpress to customize. Well not anymore. This plugin allows you to add whatever you want to the Dashboard through PHP and HTML and allows you to even add Sidebar Widgets. You may also wipe the entire dashboard or individually remove some of the more irritating sections like the Dev news, Planet Wordpress and the getting started section.

In WordPress 2.5, the code is cleaner, the plugin is more responsive and you can add both “real” sidebar widgets, or add “fake” ones to match the dashboard.

This plugin is currently intended for 2.5, but it also works in Wordpress 2.1 – 2.3 and can work in Wordpress 2.0.x if you use the Completely Wipe Dashboard option.

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Custom Category Templates on a Archive or Index page.

On my home page and in my archives, I use a custom category template to display asides and news articles. This is very easy to do and it only takes a couple seconds of work to create custom category templates in any WordPress theme.

The first step is to add the following to your current theme’s index.php loop after the line that looks like <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>, but before any other code.

  1. <?php $cat_temp = cat_loop();?>
  2. <?php if($cat_temp && is_numeric($cat_temp)){?>
  3. <?php include('loops/cat_'.$cat_temp.'.php');?>
  4. <?php }else{ ?>

Then add } just before the line endwhile.

The next step is to add the following to your theme’s functions.php file (you may have to create a file with the same name):

  1. function cat_loop(){
  2. global $blog_id,$post, $wp_version;
  3. if($wp_version >= 2.3){
  4. global $object_term_cache;
  5. $array = $object_term_cache[$blog_id][$post->ID]['category'];
  6. }else{
  7. global $category_cache;
  8. $array = $category_cache[$blog_id][$post->ID];
  9. }
  10. while (list($cat) = each($array)) {
  11. if(file_exists(dirname(__FILE__).'/loops/cat_'.$cat.'.php')){
  12. return $cat;
  13. }
  14. }
  15. }
  16. Use the following to copy and paste the code.

This can be modified to look at author’s also.

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Oh, as an Aside: Organizing Wordpress Plugin Bug Reports. (From the 18th of January)

One of the downsides of having a popular plugin is the amount of support requests, bug reports, and feature suggestions that come in. Well, it’s not that bad, but sometimes it’s difficult to organize what features should be added, what bugs must be tackled first, and what can just be ignored.

If you’re one of the few and the proud over at WP Extend Plugins, you have a nice tool at your disposal to keep track of all your plugin related needs. The tool, you ask? It’s the trac ticketing system over at the WordPress Plugin Repository.

From Weblog Tools Collection

For most of my wordpress plugins, like AJAXed Wordpress I use SVN and the WordPress Plugin Repository to keep track of changes I make to my plugins between versions to make it easier to write the changelog, but I never considered using it for bug reports.

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Oh, as an Aside: Displaying WordPress categories in a horizontal dropdown menu. (From the 16th of January)

One of my readers recently asked how I created my horizontal menu bar: the short answer is by mixing CSS and Javascript.

The first step is to get WordPress to display the menu as a hierarchical list without a title. <?php wp_list_categories('sort_column=name&sort_order=asc&style=list&children=true&hierarchical=true&title_li=0'); ?>

We then wrap this WordPress code in the following so we can style it.

  1. <div style="text-align:center;">
  2. <ul id="menu" style="padding:0; margin:0;">
  3. <?php wp_list_categories('sort_column=name&sort_order=asc&style=list&children=true&hierarchical=true&title_li=0'); ?>
  4. </ul>
  5. </div>

I added this to my header.php, but you can add it anywhere you want it to appear.

The CSS is fairly simple and you just need to add it to your theme’s style.css file.

  1. ul#menu {
  2. margin: 0;
  3. padding: 0;
  4. list-style: none;
  5. width: 100%;
  6. font-size:1.2em;
  7. }
  9. ul#menu li {
  10. float: left;
  11. padding: 0;
  12. margin: 0;
  13. border-right:solid 1px #fff;
  14. }
  16. ul#menu ul li {
  17. float: none;
  18. position: relative;
  19. border-bottom: 1px solid #7EAED7; /* fixes gap problem in IE */
  20. border-left: 1px solid #FFF;
  21. z-index:1000;
  22. }
  24. ul#menu li ul {
  25. margin: 0;
  26. padding: 0;
  27. display:none;
  28. list-style: none;
  29. position: absolute;
  30. background: #9CC;
  31. }
  32. ul#menu ul ul{
  33. margin-left: .2em;
  34. position: absolute;
  35. top: 0; /* if using borders, -1px to align top borders */
  36. left: 100%;
  37. }
  39. ul#menu * a:hover, ul#menu li a:active{
  40. background:#7EAED7 !important;
  41. color: #FFFFFF;
  42. }
  44. ul#menu li a:link,
  45. ul#menu li a:visited,
  46. ul#menu li a:hover,
  47. ul#menu li a:active{
  48. display: block;
  49. padding: .2em .3em;
  50. text-decoration: none;
  51. background: #5587B3;
  52. color: #FFFFFF;
  53. }
  56. ul#menu ul li a:link,
  57. ul#menu ul li a:visited,
  58. ul#menu ul li a:hover,
  59. ul#menu ul li a:active {
  60. width: 8em;
  61. }
  62. Use the following to copy and paste the code.

Of course you will need to change the colors and text sizes to ensure it blends with the rest of the theme.

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Oh, as an Aside: Tag Management for Wordpress 2.3 (From the 22nd of October)

Now that you have gotten used to WP 2.3 and had time to fiddle around with all those tags, you are probably finding that you need to edit, rename or delete tags. While I was going to write my own Plugins for this for a while, I found the perfect Plugins to do the work for me — and by perfect I mean really good, so I take no responsibility if they eat your dog.

The Simple Tags has been around for a long time, but now it works perfectly with Wordpress tagging. What does it do? Most everything you could want (I could retype the list, but I’m going to borrow it straight from the Simple Tags website):

  • type-ahead input tags
  • auto suggestion of tags
  • tags management (rename, delete, amalgamate, search and add tags, edit tags ID)
  • List of non tagged contents
  • Edit mass tags
  • Possibility to tag pages (not only posts) and include them inside the tags results
  • Related content since common tags
  • Possibility to add related posts inside RSS
  • Dynamic Tag Clouds with colors with Widgets
  • Tags inside your header’s blog
  • Embedded tags ([tags]tag1, tag2[/tags]) for retro compatibility

I use a lot of Plugins and write a lot of Plugins, so the fact that I even use one usually means it is really well made or very useful, but this one is one of the very few that I thought was good enough to promote.

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Oh, as an Aside: Mysql Search and Replace. (From the 31st of August)

I’ve been getting ready for Wordpress 2.3, so in preparation I’ve started cleaning up my database. My first order of business was to clean up the tags database. Over time I’ve used several different methods of separating words: all spaces, hyphens and underscores have all been used which really makes the nice names ugly. Fixing this was easy, I just used the MYSQL replace command:

UPDATE `table` SET `field` = REPLACE(Field,'change_me','to_me');

Or specifically for the tags:

UPDATE `wp_tags` SET `tag` = REPLACE(tag,'_',' ');

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