Tech from Hel

The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Projects in Web Development

A few personal web projects that I worked on with prerequisites and download links.

How to Add Horizontal Submenus to Your Administration Plugin in Wordpress 2.7+

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.
Image #1: Plugin with sidebar menu

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 1280×800 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 1280×800 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.
image #2: Plugin with horizontal menu 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 to the right.

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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. It only required that the version test be replaced by one that tests for current or higher version of Wordpress. I modified the code myself and now “Simple Tags 1.5.7a” runs on 2.7-dev. Read the rest of this entry »

Soon after I upgraded to Wordpress 2.6, I discovered that the Wordpress' dashboard and post/page editor cause the Safari 1.3 browser to crash. Though other Wordpress 2.6 admin functions continue to work fine in Safari 1.3, including the widget functions, without the Dashboard, users can’t login, and without the post/page editor, users can’t update their blog. This makes Wordpress 2.6 completely unusable in Safari 1.3.

A quick search of the forums showed that this problem has cropped up for other Wordpress users and that it may extend to Safari 2 as well. Here what one user had to say on wordpress.com forums.
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Step-by-Step Instructions to Install and Configure WordPress with Better Security*

When I went looking for a blogging software, I checked user ratings, server requirements, amount of documentation, available CSS templates and plugins, and did a test install of a few blogs. In the end I chose to go with WordPress because it was one of the easiest to install (it worked on the first try), it had built-in CMS (content management) capability, it had the best documentation, the most plugins, and lots of freely available CSS templates.

I installed and configured WordPress as CMS and blog for my existing website. I put WordPress in a subdirectory of my site's root directory because this is more secure and did not overwrite my existing web documents and applications. The install went smoothly and afterwards, I was delighted to find that the URLs for my other web documents** and applications continued to work seamlessly, without interference from WordPress.

Below are instructions to install your own copy of WordPress on a new or existing site, with improved security. These instructions assume that WordPress will manage your host domain/subdomain, not a subdirectory of that domain/subdomain (ie. www.mysite.com or subdomain.mysite.com, NOT www.mysite.com/blog/). It assumes that you are familiar with a FTP software to upload files to your ISP, that you can create a MySQL database on your ISP account, and that you can edit a plain text file using a text editor like Notepad or VIM. These instructions can also be used to “upgrade” an existing copy of Wordpress to make it more secure.

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