My first idea was to create a textarea where the user can define the pagebar via text tokens:

The individual parts of the pagebar would be enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {prev}, {left} or {last} The preferences would be separated with a vertical bar, if there is more than one preference these are divided by commas.
At first glance this looked like a idea for a simple solution to allow the user to customize pagebar more to his needs than it’s possible with the current version. After elaborating this idea for some time I came to the conclusion that it would end in an ugly unreadable long string that’s almost unable to maintain. There has to be a better solution.

Customization by Drag’n Drop

We’re living in the era of the Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 already?), so I thought a Drag’n Drop interface could solve the problem that new users should be able to modify their pagebar easily but experienced users should not dismiss it as childish.
Let’s take a look at a mockup I made:

Overall the settings should work as the “Widgets” setting page of WordPress itself. You have an Elements container with all the available pagebar components which can be dropped into the Drop area. In this area you can re-arrange or delete the elements.

Below this area you will always have a preview of the complete pagebar so you’re not left to your imagination.
Finally you should be able to set the preferences for each element. To do so you (right) click on an element in the drop area and a Preferences window will appear allowing you to change the settings. The image above reveals another detail I wanted to build into pagebar for ages: images.

I’ve never done drag and drop programming in jQuery but there are so many plugins with GPL, BSD, MIT or similar licenses that I should be able create a decent interface.

Far future plans
Of course I have ideas which are a bit more “advanced” and that I don’t plan to include in v3.0 or v3.1 (or even before 4.0 ). One is to make pagebar extensible. Maybe someone wants to have buttons like “+10 pages” and “-10 pages” or (as one user requests since ages) an “I’m feeling lucky” button that sends the user to a random page. These are features that individuals may want to have in their pagebar but the majority of users would never use. Just like in WordPress itself plugins could solve this dilemma.

The post New ideas for pagebar v3 – Part 2: Customization by Drag’n Drop appeared first on elektroelch.net.

Part 1: Direct page access

I always wanted to add a fast and direct page selection. The easiest way would be to add a selection box containing all page numbers. This might work if you’re having about 10 pages but if your blog is really, really large, say about 300 pages, a select box with 300 numbers would be quite clumsy:

There has to be a better way. Here are mockups of my suggestions of a fast page selection UI.

Hierarchical dropdown menus

The idea is a hierarchical representation of the pages in steps of 10 pages. If you select such a range you will get another popup displaying the the actual pages you can select. This selection requires three clicks but is much more accessible than an almost endless list of numbers.
What happens if you click the “100 – 199″ link? Will there be a list of 100 pages? No, of course not, this wouldn’t be much better than the simple approach mentioned before. Instead it will display an additional popup:

I tweeted that the algorithm might be somewhat tricky but I stripped the idea down to the necessary so that the code itself should not be the problem. There might be some less important problems like what happens if the pagebar is at the bottom of the browser window (not too unlikely) and the popups would open outside the window but I think this can be handled with a little jquery code.

With many pages it is quite expensive to create the list over and over again so it would be a good idea to cache the list in a transient which is deleted and recalculated upon adding or removal of posts.

Direct keyboard input
If you don’t like the dropdown menus pagebar v3 could contain a simple direct input of the page number using the keyboard. I’m thinking of two versions. The first is expanding the button and containing a textinput inside (a) the other is opening a small popup above or below the pagebar (b). I’m not sure which to take:

Other methods

Are there any other good methods of jumping directly to a page that is not available in the main pagebar? If there is, don’t hesitate and enlighten me in the comment section. Thanks.

The post Ideas for pagebar v3 – Part 1: Direct page access appeared first on elektroelch.net.

There are add-ons for various browsers to do this simple task:

• Firefox – Unhide passwords
• Opera – Show/Hide passwords
• Chrome – Show password on focus
• Safari – ShowPass
• There does not seem to be any extension for the Internet Explorer.

So if you’re not more paranoid than the average nerd give one of the add-ons a try. You might not want to un-install it again.

The post Hide the password hiding stars appeared first on elektroelch.net.

Twenty-Ten

Twenty-Ten is my all-time favourite, seems nobody ever thought that there may be a post with more than 12 pages:

Twenty-Eleven

Next year the layout was much better:

Twenty-Twelve

The latest default theme seems to have no layout for paged posts at all (though there is a bit CSS used for the list):

Despite the layout mayhem: does a user really wants to go to page 73, or 99? (OK, maybe the user got an email “Look at page 73″). Isn’t it more likely that the user wants to go to the next or previous page, skip two pages or go to the last page?

Change!

Here’s the same post with the default settings of pagebar:

This looks much better, even for posts with many pages. Of course you can change many aspects of the layout of the pagebar in the settings. As a bonus you get a button for displaying all parts of the post, WordPress does not contain this by default.
For those who want to allow the user to select a specific page, pagebar v3 will contain a hierarchical dropdown list for easy access.

Use pagebar! You can download it from the WordPress repository.

The post Why you should use pagebar for your blog appeared first on elektroelch.net.

1.

Instead I created another minor version with some features which are quite easy to implement. First there is a new default theme based on CSS3:

To activate the new layout you have to copy the included file pagebar.css to your current theme.

2.

I took the advice of Pippin and added some actions:

• pagebar_before/pagebar_after (This action is executed before and after every kind of pagebar)

Additionally every bar has an action of its own:

• postbar_before/postbar_after, commentbar_before/commentbar_after, multipagebar_before/multipagebar_after

3.

One of the main problems of the automagic insertion of postbbar was a second query in the sidebar displaying “Recent posts” that is used by many themes. Version 3.3 introduced a new function called “is_main_query” which enables the plugins to display the postbar only after the main main query. I hope this works for all themes because @toscho thinks that the function has some issues.

4.

Finally there is a new translation for pagebar: Romanian (ro_RO). I received the translation ages ago, excuses go to Web Geek Science

Links:

• pagebar plugin page

The post New version of pagebar released (v2.60) appeared first on elektroelch.net.

If you click on Edit a field appears in which you can enter the desired publishing date:

You can not only choose a date in the future but also a date in the past. After you have entered the date you should not forget to OK because otherwise the new date isn’t used when you publish the post:

If you press Publish the post will be published with the date set above:

Update: Monika Thon-Soun advised me that this practice may not be suitable if you’re focusing on search engine ranking since the subsequent entry may confuse Google et al.

The post WordPress: Publishing posts in the past appeared first on elektroelch.net.

The solution to this problem is quite easy if you remember that post tags are nothing else but pre-defined taxonomies and that you can use the function get_terms to retrieve the terms of a taxonomy:

$tag_ids = get_terms( 'post_tag', array('fields' => 'ids', 'get' => 'all') );

Funny enough there is a function for getting all category IDs (get_all_category_ids).

The post WordPress: Get IDs of *ALL* post tags appeared first on elektroelch.net.

Creating tables in the database

WordPress provides tables and, yet even better, functions to store the data of your plugin. There is for example wp_postmeta to store data applying to a post, repectively wp_usermeta for user data.
To store general data of your plugin you can use the wp_options table. You don’t even need to create a new row for every single piece of data but you can combine all your data into an array and use the serialize() function to store it into a single set.
(Edit: Since version 2.0.1 it’s not necessary to seialize the data yourself because the update_* take care of it themselves.)
As you see, there is no need to create your own tables or to use your own SQL statements.

Always requesting “fresh” data

You do not need to pull data from external sources or aggregate data from the database every time your plugin is executed. There are good chances that the data you need does not change over a longer period of time. You can use some sophisticated WordPress functions to cache the data using the “Transient API”. It provides function to temporary store data (set_transient), to retrieve it (get_transient) and some others to control storage of temporary data.

Creating everything from scratch

WordPress contains a heap of useful functions especially for database access. So before you start connecting manually to the WordPress database take a look at the $wpdb class which contains everything you need to coennect to the database, add_user_meta, add_post_meta, and other useful functions to store, alter and delete data. Take a look at them before even thinking about creating your custom SQL statement. Besides being easy to use these function assure that your plugin will work even if the database layout is changed dramatically.

After me, the deluge!

Your plugin may be the best invention since sliced bread and everyone should use it. Nevertheless be convinced that there are definitely people who test you plugin and think that there must be something better and uninstall it. So take care that your plugin does no leave any clutter in the database by deleting any trace on uninstall. On uninstall not on deactivation because a user may deactivate your plugin though he wants to continue using it, e.g. for debugging purposes, and would be happy if his options are still set upon re-activation. So be nice!

There are many other things you can do wrong ® at programming a good WordPress plugin and I hope that @nacin will create a blog about it some day.

The post Yet another rant about bad WordPress plugin programming habits appeared first on elektroelch.net.

If you hover the mouse cursor over the icon all found feeds will be displayed:

As you see not only the main feed is found but also the comment feed and possible others. With this script installed you can simply click on this icon and subscribe to feeds without frantically scanning the page.

• Download “Jasper’s Google Reader subscribe”

The post My favorite Greasemonkey-Script appeared first on elektroelch.net.

<select size="5">
  <option "test1" />
  <option "test2" />
  <option "test3" />
  <option "test4" />
  <option "test5" />
  <option "test6" />
</select>

What everybody including me expects is something like this:

But I actually got this:

The mystery lies in the style sheet for the admin area:

#wpcontent select {
	padding: 2px;
	height: 2em;
	font-size: 12px;
}

This forces every selectbox to display only one element. I have no idea why this is implemented. There is also a ticket in the WP tracking system discussing this behaviour since two years.

The solution to this problem is quite easy:

<select style="height:auto" size="5">

Seems easy but costed me over 1 hour of my lifetime.

The post The selectbox mystery of WordPress appeared first on elektroelch.net.