Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category

In February 2008 I made my first public Wordpress plugin, Endmark.  I told a few people about it, even.  Then I moved my blog here and Endmark sort of disappeared.  Today, it’s back.

Endmark is a simple little thing.  What it does is adds a little end-of-article symbol to all of your Wordpress posts, similar to the symbols found at the end of magazine articles.

Now, for magazines the purpose of the symbol is really to show where the article ends, or rather that it ends and is not continued on another page.  On a blog, that’s more obvious anyways, so the purpose of it is cosmetic.  Still, I wanted it for one project, so I made this.

If that sounds like a nice addition to your blog’s style, then head over to the Endmark Wordpress plugin page and give it a try.  Let me know if you notice any bugs or have any comments or requests.  I’ll do my best to keep it somewhat maintained.

By the way, you can see Endmark in action on this very blog.  For example, there’s an Endmark at the end of this line.

Wordpress 2.8 came out today.  According to its developers, this release contains some 790 bug fixes.  It’s now available for download from the Wordpress site.

Most of the interface remains unchanged, though it’s supposedly much faster.  The way widgets work is the most obvious of the changes:

The upgrade went smoothly on this blog (so far), and I’ll be rolling it out to my own sites, and some of my clients’ sites, over the next couple of days.

I had neglected to grab a couple of Wordpress updates, so when I saw the notice about Wordpress 2.7 on one of my dashboards today, I figured it was about time.  I went to download it, installed, and was suprised to see… things were different.

The new dashboard on my Xbox Living blog.

The Wordpress team has been busy, it seems.  It wasn’t that long ago that the Wordpress Admin had design change, but this takes things further.  The buttons feel very Safari/Apple-inspired, but the interface still feels like Wordpress.  I’m going to have to play around with it, but I’m finding it very easy to work with.  I haven’t struggled to find anything yet.

So far, I’m impressed.

I recently came across a situation where I needed to display the contents of a page in a Wordpress sidebar.  Essentially, my client needed an easy way to edit a sidebar that appeared on multiple pages.  Editing a Text widget wasn’t an option: they needed the flexibility of editing a page.

It took a few tries/revisions to find the best way to do this, so I thought I’d share my solution.  All I did was create a page with a specific slug (”sidebarpage”) and echo its content.  I used it in a sidebar widget, but you could use this anywhere in your Wordpress Theme if you’d like to have an additional editable area.

Be sure that you’re creating a seperate WP_Query object ($sidebarpage in this example) — otherwise you’ll modify the query on the page itself, and your sidebar content will show up in the main body of your posts/pages as well!

The down-side of having this content stored in a page is that the page will appear in page listings, so be sure to exclude it if these are used in your theme.