WordPress Plugin: Favorites Menu Manager
Favorites Menu Manager lets you customize the drop-down menu located at the top right of the WordPress admin screen.
Favorites Menu Manager allows you unfettered customization of that dropdown menu. You can easily add your own links, remove existing ones, and put them in the order you desire. Customizations are stored on a per-user basis, so each user can have their own collection of frequently used links.
You can also customize the Favorites Menu with code depending on which page is loaded in the admin panel, but doing so using a plugin is of course more convenient.
Download Favorites Menu Manager
Tip: use shortcodes anywhere
Shortcodes are meant to be used for post and page content, but with a little custom code you can make them work elsewhere, as shown in this article:
- Text Widgets
- Template Files
- Comments
- Excerpts
- User Descriptions
- Category, Tag, and Taxonomy Descriptions
I think the most crucial piece of code to remember here is the one for theme files. Just add the line do_shortcode('[foo]'); and that will obey shortcode syntax. Super convenient! Also check out this list of custom shortcodes. For WordPress.com users, there are a bunch of media shortcodes already built in.
See also: how to use widgets anywhere.
Tip: add a widget anywhere with the_widget()
Here’s a very useful tip for everyone comfortable with customizing their WordPress themes: you can add any widget anywhere on your site, not just in your sidebar or widgetized areas, using the template tag the_widget.
Here’s the syntax:
<?php the_widget($widget, $instance, $args); ?>
This post by Shailan explains how to find the widget class name and arguments to use in the code. Refer to the Codex for the names of the default widgets. Want to create your own widget? Valums shows you how.
24 days of WordPress during the holidays
The lovely folks at WPEngineer have started a WP Advent Calendar—a WordPress-themed countdown of sorts in line with the holiday season. It’s like 24 ways but for WordPress, or perhaps a winter counterpart to Summer of Code.
Here’s something from Day 3:
Imagine that it is possible to break into the blog, or potentially damage the entire web space of the server. I wouldn’t like to pay the invoice of your provider for the damage and surely don’t want to lose my whole website and files. And all this because you wanted to save $59!
If you want to have a special theme, buy it! The theme developer also provide support within the $59, also many developer help with customization, updates and much more. A pretty good deal in my opinion.
So take the advice and rather buy a premium theme than download it for “free” somewhere else. The same applies also for premium Plugins.
What a great way to spend Christmas, if I do say so myself!
WordPress Plugin: My Snippets
My Snippets lets you add custom widgets depending on the post displayed. It adds a custom meta box where you can add text or code, which shows up in your widget areas.
What I wanted was something that allowed me to control widget content from the post editor, so I wouldn’t have to worry about setting my widgets. This gave me the idea for the My Snippets plugin.
What this plugin does is add an extra meta box on the post editor that allows you to input custom content. This content is then displayed using the Snippet widget in any widget area you choose.
This is a really neat idea for making your website more dynamic. Combined with a theme that has lots of widgetized areas, this could very well change the way people compose and add extra information like videos, graphs, or quotes to their blog posts.
Question is, would it be possible to add the meta content to your feed? Because RSS readers certainly shouldn’t be exempt from them. Or perhaps create shortcodes for inserting them into the post editor, but only make them appear in-text if it’s in the feed, and in the widget areas otherwise. Just a suggestion though! There are probably many other uses for this plugin that people can come up with.
Create your own WordPress Dashboard Widgets
Did you know that you can tweak your WordPress Dashboard with custom Widgets? Take note that this is different from the Widgets feature you can use on your blog. WooCamp has a nice two-step tutorial on it:
- Copy the given code in the blog post
- Modify the given code for specific functionality for your widget
Easy-peasy! Another great way to customize the backend of WordPress-powered sites, especially if you’re using it as a CMS for clients and friends.
Force WordPress theme CSS changes immediately
Theme authors: if you’ve been tweaking a WordPress site’s CSS file, the changes you’ve made usually don’t immediately show up for the blog visitors without a forced refresh. The reason: web browsers usually keep cached copies of site files. Mark Jaquith has a neat fix that allows you to grab the latest version of the CSS file and override the cached one automatically.
Just use this line of code in your header.php file:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/style.css?v=<?php echo filemtime(TEMPLATEPATH . '/style.css'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" />This automatically updates the
?v=part every time you modify the file. Boom. Now everyone instantly sees your changes.
This should also work for other files like your Javascript files.
Beautiful and SEO-friendly titles for WordPress
Even without transforming a WordPress-powered site into a full-blown CMS, there are a lot of sections to a WP site, e.g., posts, monthly archives, search results, static pages, and so on. One thing that helps keep visitors from getting lost when they dig deeper into these sections is knowing exactly where they are, and that’s by the titles of pages.
Learn how to customize those section titles with the help of this tutorial. Not only does it make for a better user experience, it gives plus points in the search engine optimization department as well!
WordPress participates in Google Summer of Code 2009
Once again WordPress is participating in the annual Google Summer of Code and is inviting everyone to help out in improving specific aspects of the blogging software as well as related projects like WPMU and BuddyPress.
You name it, we want you to propose it. It’s true, competition is fierce, but hey, if you’re already hacking WordPress, you’re ahead of the pack as far as we’re concerned. Applications are being accepted as of today, and the deadline is on April 3, 2009.
There’s also a list of mentors you can approach if you want to participate in the summer-long hacking. It also helps to check out the suggested ideas section of the website.
Sign up here. Visit the Google Summer of Code 2009 site for more details.
Count your feed subscribers for blog contests
Let’s not ask why subscribing to one’s blog is a common criterion for all the blog contests out there; let’s be thankful Thaya Kareeson over at Weblog Tools Collection has written a helpful tutorial for keeping track of new subscribers to your RSS feed.
The technique involves adding a special contest code that appears only in the feed, which subscribers can use to indicate they are indeed subscribed:
A known solution to this problem is to include a special contest code into your RSS feed and not have this code visible on your website. That way each contestant will be forced to grab the code from your feed and submit the code via comments to verify that they have subscribed to the RSS feed.
Even if you’re uncomfortable with editing PHP, all you have to do is copy the code given in the article and you should be good to go. All in all, this is a smart technique that should help you out for your next blog contest!
