Archives for posts with tag: WordPress

Edit Flow v0.3: Usergroups and improved notifications

February 8, 10 //
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Edit Flow was bumped up to v0.3 last week and saw a flurry of other updates as bugs cropped up that I had managed to miss during the testing phase before release. The main focus of this release was to introduce usergroups, which will form the basis of future features and to enhance the notification functionality that was introduced in the previous version.

If you haven’t upgraded yet, download it from the Plugin Directory or directly from within WordPress.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the new features introduced in this release:

Usergroups

Version 0.3+ adds in what are called usergroups. On the outset, they’re similar to “Roles” built into WordPress, except that (at this stage) usergroups are simply ways to associate groups of users together. Edit Flow adds a number of sample usergroups for you to get started (as shown above) and get a sense of what sort of groupings you can create. However, the main power of usergroups comes with…

Notification Controls

Much of the feedback Edit Flow received since the email notification were introduced centred around having greater control over who receives notifications. Previously, post updates were emailed to authors, editorial commenters, and any roles that had been selected to receive notifications. Many people were drawn to the notification feature but were forced to keep it disabled since they didn’t want all their editors or administrators notified on every single post update.

With the new release, you can specify on a post level, what users and usergroups should receive notifications, so that only relevant people and groups of people receive updates.

Note: with the introduction of this feature the “Notify by Role” option was removed. In its place, a new feature was added “Always notify admin option” which includes the blog administrator in all notifications. To all overly protective, nosy admins that want to know everything: you’re welcome :)

This is just the beginning of notifications. Some interesting ideas that I’d like to integrate in future versions of Edit Flow include:

  • Giving users the ability  to subscribe to posts themselves
  • Have specific users or usergroups automatically subscribed to posts based on categories or tags assigned to posts.
  • Make the UI a bit more efficient. The UI for this new feature is something that was unfortunately rushed. My original vision didn’t make it in (due to various impracticalities, changes, and lack of time), but it’s very much a high priority on my list to make it easy to select users/usergroups (especially for installs with hundreds and thousands of users).

More Useful Notifications

On the topic of notifications, the new release introduces emails that are slightly more descriptive in terms of the action taken on the post. The subject line of the email will specify whether the post was created, published, unpublished, etc. Although a small change, it should hopefully help users manage incoming emails more effectively and not get inundated with a barrage of “Post Status was changed” emails. (Interestingly, I’ve found that this new change comes in handy even on my personal blog which is a simple on-user blog. I find these notifications fairly useful especially since I make aggressive use of WordPress’ future scheduling functionality.)

Additionally, the action links in comment notifications now take the user directly to the editorial comment form (e.g. clicking on “Add editorial comment” will open the post and take to directly to the Editorial Comment form). Again, not a major feature but something that should hopefully save you some time, scrolling and future dealings with Carpal Tunnel.

I’d like to extend this feature even further and allow users to reply to comments via email and not have to go into WordPress to do so. (As you can see, there’s a bit a time-saving trend going on here.)

New widget: Posts I’m Following

Still a little crude at this stage, this new widget gives you a list of the most recently updated posts that you’re following. However, this widget will likely form the basis of the activity stream, which will offer an audit trail of activity happening within the WordPress admin.

Knight News Challenge Round II

While not really a feature introduced in 0.3+, here’s a bit of news that may be interest: we’ve submitted our 2nd round application for the Knight News Challenge. Check out it, vote, and leave us some feedback.

What’s Next?

Apart from some of the ideas already mentioned, with the next couple of Edit Flow releases, you can expect to see some great features such as:

  • Post task lists (à la Basecamp, namely a list of tasks that must be completed in order for a post to be published)
  • Better Post Management (to help you track and manage your content better, such as snapshots of how far along existing content is)
  • HTML emails (because emails should always be pretty – but always fallback to plain text for people still living in the ’90s)

Your Homework

As always, your feedback is much appreciated and vital to our development. Let us know what about Edit Flow works for you and what doesn’t and what else Edit Flow can do to improve your organization’s WordPress experience.

We’ve already had discussions with several online and print publishers and newsrooms interested in adopting Edit Flow and would love to include you in that conversation. Why not get in touch?

WordPress plugin: Feedkillah

January 8, 10 //
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Update (2010-01-09): So turns out wpengineer.com had this figured out a while back (i.e. October 2008). Regardless, it was a good opportunity for me to dig into the WordPress core and figure out what’s going on.

…or in “proper” English: Feed Killer.

Basically, a small plugin to disable all your feeds on your WordPress install, for whatever crazy reason; we don’t judge (much). This is a result of a question by @wesbos.

There’s also a non-plugin version if you don’t want to go the plugin route (for whatever crazy reason; again, we don’t judge (extensively)). Just add the code to your theme’s functions.php file.

See below or download from gisthub.

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Edit Flow/WordPress Idea: User Directory

November 17, 09 //
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Update: sorry, should have pointed out that this idea was inspired by wireframes posted by Anthony Pesce (of the Populous project).

Here’s an idea that I thought might be a useful addition to Edit Flow especially once we add in User Group functionality. The main premise is to have a full-out User Directory accessible by logged in users that provides easy access to contact information for other users on the site. Would probably only be useful for larger groups using WordPress, but I’d imagine would still come in handy for newsrooms and such.

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WordPress Plugin: Plugin Notes

October 26, 09 //
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This is the outcome of a couple of hours of Friday night coding after an open call by Chris Coyier over at Digging into WordPress. Here’s what Chris asked for:

Ever look through your list of plugins and forget just exactly what one of them does? I know they have descriptions next to them, but that doesn’t always speak to exactly what you are using it for and why. This plugin would just put a text field in each plugin field you could type some notes in there, theoretically to keep information about why and how you are using this plugin.

And since I was bored (and thought this was a pretty useful idea), I delivered. Plugin Notes is exactly what it sounds like.

Once you install and activate, the plugin adds a link “Add plugin note” that lets you add in a little note next to each plugin. It’s totally ajaxified and full of cool goodness. (Unfortunately, I was a bad programmer and didn’t make plugin gracefully degrade when javascript is turned off. Sorry, folks. Maybe next time.)

Plugin Notes: adding a note is easier than milking a cow.

Plugin Notes: adding a note is easier than milking a cow.

When a note is added, it shows up inside a little blue box and includes the name of the user that added the note as well as the date and time when the note was added. You also get handy dandy options to “Edit” or “Delete” notes.

WordPress plugin: Plugin Notes - blue boxes make things look pretty.

WordPress plugin: Plugin Notes - blue boxes make things look pretty.

Each plugin can only have one note. I can imagine there would be cases where multiple notes may come in handy, but those would be rare so I’m passing on that functionality.

The plugin is pretty simplistic, and unlikely to see any future feature additions (unless someone really, really wants one). I’ll keep a watch for compatibility with future versions of WordPress though, so rest easy.

Excited, enough? Grab Plugin Notes (from the WordPress Plugin Directory) or download it from within WordPress.

Note: you’ll need PHP5 and a javascript-enabled browser for the plugin to work.

WordPress Tip: Using the same template across multiple category, tag, and author pages

June 30, 09 //
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Sharing Category Templates

Sharing Category Templates

Update (2009-12-21): So, the original technique that I had posted is a bit hacky and kinda gets annoying when you have lots of categories and category templates. There’s a better approach that can add to your functions.php file to make everything work magically, which was inspired by Justin Tadlock’s comment on a post by Elliot Jay Stocks. Code below:

Add to your theme’s functions.php file and edit as necessary. For example, to redirect to categories with IDs 1 & 5 to a template called gallery.php, change the if statement to: 

if( is_category( array( 1, 5 ) ) )
    template = locate_template( array( 'gallery.php', 'category.php' ) );

Easy, no?

Note: the stuff below is old, crappy, “legacy” code. Still here for posterity…

WordPress has an amazing theming system. It’s not perfect, but if you know the right things you can bend it to your will and do a lot of cool things. One great thing about it is the template hierarchy; WordPress basically allows you to create custom templates for categories, tags, authors, etc.

For example, if I add category.php to my theme, all category pages will now be styled according the structure within the category.php file. Now, let’s say I have a category called “Photos” that I wanted to look a little different from the rest. (Let’s assume the category ID for “Photos” is 6). All I have to do is add category-6.php to my theme, modify it to whatever, and the “Photos” category page will switch to this new template. Cool? Definitely.

With a system like this, you could technically customize your site to the point where the every category, author, tag, etc. page has a unique look and feel. But, that’s quite a lot of work and in most cases unnecessary. There may be cases though, where you want a small subset of categories to have a unique look, and you want these pages to share this look. Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t allow different pages to share templates. (Intuitively, I would think that something like creating a file called category-6,7,8.php [or similar] would apply this template to categories 6, 7, and 8). You could technically set up separate files (category-6.php / category-7.php / category8.php) and just copy and paste the code across all of them, but that’s a maintenance nightmare. A single change will have to be copied over multiple times, and that’s just annoying.

There are a few ways around this. One of easy ways is to use Idealion’s Category Enhancements plugin. Alternatively, if you want a more theme-level solution, follow the steps below. This is something I discovered while building out the image gallery pages for The Boar (links of what I came up with are at the bottom).

1. In your theme folder, create the category files for the categories you want to apply the custom template to.

  • Let’s assume we want to apply it to the categories “Portrait Photography” (ID: 5) and “Nature Photography” (ID: 12).
  • In this case we’d create category-5.php and category-12.php

2. In the category template files (category-5.php & category-12.php), add the following:

<?php require_once('common_template.php'); ?>

3. Create a generic category template: common_template.php

4. Then in the common_template.php, add the following:

<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php echo 'Hello World!'; ?>
<!-- The rest of your custom template goes here -->
<?php get_footer(); ?>

5. Now, if you navigate to http://your-site.com/?cat=5 and http://your-site.com/?cat=12, you’ll notice that their look will mirror what you included in common_template.php

I should note that this approach isn’t limited to category templates; you can use this with author and tags templates as well. Technically, with this approach you could combine multiple categories and tags, as well (though if you do, be wary of category- and tag-specific functions and make use of conditional tags).

You can see an example of this in action at the links below:

Sample files you work from. Download them, rename the extension to .php and throw them into your template folder.

Thoughts, questions, suggestions? Leave a comment below or send me an email.

Edit Flow Project: Stage 1 beta release

June 17, 09 //
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Note: this is cross-posted from a post that I wrote on the CoPress blog.

This past weekend, we released the beta version of Stage 1 (Custom Post Statuses) of the Edit Flow Project, a plugin aiming to improve the WordPress Admin Interface for a multi-user newsroom’s editorial workflow.

The main goal of this stage was to “improve posts statuses by allowing custom statuses.” WordPress, by default, only allows for two statuses for posts during the editing process: “Draft” and “Pending Review”. These statuses are not very descriptive nor do they make it easy to track a story as it moves through a newsroom’s often complex, multi-level workflow.

With the release of Stage 1 of Edit Flow, WordPress users can now assign custom statuses to posts, giving them more control over the state of their content.

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Co-Authors Plus Upgraded to v1.2

June 15, 09 //
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I released a new update for Co-Authors Plus today. The version number gets bumped to v1.2 and includes mostly fixes, the major one being compatibility with WordPress 2.8. Details about changes below. To upgrade, click the upgrade link in your WordPress Admin dashboard, under Plugins, or download the latest version here.

Any issues, leave a comment, or send me a message.

  • FIX: Added compatibility for WordPress 2.8
  • FIX: Added new template tags (getthecoauthormeta & thecoauthor_meta) to fix issues related to displaying author info on author archive pages. See Other Notes for details.
  • FIX: Plugin should now work for plugins not using the ‘wp_’ DB prefix
  • FIX: Coauthors should no longer be alphabetically reordered when the post is updated
  • FIX: Plugin now used WordPress native AJAX calls to tighten security
  • DOCS: Added details about the new template tags

Co-Authors Plus v1.1.3 released

April 24, 09 //
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Today, I released the first public version of the Co-Authors Plus plug-in for WordPress, which allows multiple authors to be added to Posts and Pages. The plug-in is an extension of the Co-Authors plug-in created by Weston Ruter.

The plug-in is a result of a this conversation, namely how to deal with users as your userbase grows, a genuine problem facing newspapers, magazines, and community sites using WordPress, and a problem I’ve been toying with for a while now while working on website for The Boar.

Currently, WordPress allows only a single author per Post/Page. Weston’s plugin fixed that problem. However, the other design problem it failed to overcome was the usage of drop-downs to assign users to Posts/Pages. Once you scale up to 10+ users, this starts to become unmanageable (and when you start pushing 100+ it really becomes a problem).¬† Granted, the typical blog would not deal with this problem. Granted, the design is only a problem when you dealing with a large number of users, and therefore not something the average blog would worry about.

So, what’s the main difference between Co-Authors and Co-Authors Plus?

The most notable difference is the replacement of the standard WordPress authors drop-downs with search-as-you-type/auto-suggest/whatever-you-call-them input boxes. As a result, major bits of the JavaScript code was changed to be more jQuery-friendly. Eventually, I hope to include the ability to add new Users from within the Edit Post/Page screen, to fix another piece of broken workflow, and possibly Gravatar support.

Find it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/co-authors-plus/