Tech from Hel » Plugins

WassUp Works Well with WP Widget Cache

helene — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:51:02 +0000

WassUp users looking for ways to speed up their site or blog should try WP Widget Cache plugin. WP Widget Cache plays nicely with WassUp because it caches only the widgets on a page and does not affect other code in the document. It caches sidebar and footer widgets and allows you to customize cache settings for each widget individually. According to the author, you can achieve up 70% improvement in your site's performance with this plugin. After installing it on my own blog and setting a cache timeout of 24 hours (86400 seconds) on all static widgets, I saw a impressive improvement in load speed, myself. Read more...

A Fine Fix for “get_currentuserinfo undefined”

helene — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:25:56 +0000

If you write a Wordpress plugin that calls the function “get_currentuserinfo()”, you should be aware that this could trigger the fatal error, “get_currentuserinfo undefined’, in some Wordpress configurations. Depending on what your plugin does, this error could impact a Wordpress site's display, so it is important to prevent it from ever happening.

One fix (as published by several WP bloggers) is to edit your plugin to add the code, include "/wp-includes/pluggable.php", manually before you call “get_currentuserinfo()” (or other Wordpress user functions). This methods works in most cases, but it runs the risk of causing an irreconcilable conflict with any membership or user management plugins that may be installed on the same site.

A better fix is to include a priority argument with your plugin hook function... Read more.

Horizontal Submenus for WordPress Admin Plugins

helene — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:57:34 +0000

With the launch of version 2.7 in December 2008, Wordpress added several new features and changed its user interface (UI). I especially like the new automatic update feature and the new vertical sidebar is sleeker and more modern looking. However, I find navigating the menus on that new sidebar to be very inefficient when administration plugins add more selections to it.

As an admin plugin author, I want my users to have easy access to my plugin menu and submenus. In Wordpress 2.2 to 2.6, the built-in menu functions accomplished this with horizontal menus at the top of the page. In 2.7, however, the same menu functions now place the plugin menu (and submenus) near the bottom of the page, in the sidebar. This makes navigation more cumbersome because plugin menus are positioned outside the initial viewing area of the screen in a typical 1280x800 browser window. The user has to scroll down to select the plugin and, after the plugin is selected, scroll down again to navigate the plugin's submenus. Worse, it not always obvious that there are submenus available for a plugin. You can see an example of this in image #1 where the green line indicates the end of the window area of a 1280x800 resolution browser window.

To workaround this problem in my own admin plugin, I inserted a new horizontal menu containing the submenu links at the top of each submenu page. To keep the look consistent with WordPress' new style, I positioned the menu inline with the "contextual help" button and also adopted it's "look and feel". This was a relatively simple task to do, once I located and copied the appropriate styles from WordPress' admin stylesheets. You can see an example of this new horizontal menu in the second image.

A Simple Fix for “Simple Tags”

helene — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 04:26:28 +0000

I am not an official Wordpress tester, but to keep up with the latest changes and to make sure my own plugins are always compatible with upcoming versions of Wordpress, I run Wordpress development version on this site.

There are several plugins installed on this site that end up also getting tested for compatibility with upcoming versions of Wordpress, although that is not my intention. Wassup, cFormsII, Bad Behavior, and Akismet all run successfully on Wordpress 2.7 development version . One plugin that failed was Simple Tags version 1.5.7 by Amaury Balmer. This plugin produced an error because of a test in the code that rejects unrecognized versions of Wordpress. Fortunately the fix was simple.