This is a new series of weekly posts that will highlight requests that are sent to us from users looking for a certain tool or functionality. In many cases the tools are either just not there, someone has not thought of it yet, not possible to acheive or the solution has been completely overlooked by us. This would a good place for suggestions, links, directions and offers of help. I will not post the requesters contact information unless expressly asked to do so. If you have asked us for help and see your request in the list, please check back this post or subscribe to the comments. If you need help or have a request or a question that you would like added, please use the Contact Form in the top menu or email one of the authors of this blog. There will be a single WP WishList post per week and only if there are enough requests in the week.
Disclaimer: This is meant for those that have tried to find a solution, posted on the WordPress Support Forums, searched the web and have still not found the solution they were looking for. If the answer is blatant and can be easily searched and found, you might find your requests ignored. This is not meant for help or support of existing tools, nor is it aimed towards paid development or support. This is mostly an idea generation tool for WordPress developers who are looking to write new plugins, widgets, tools and hacks and for the community to use in case they are sorely missing a feature/plugin/widget they would love to have.
This weeks requests for ideas include:
- A Sidebar Archives plugin or widget that reduces the use of vertical space, displays somewhat detailed, intuitive and useful archive links and is not very load intensive. Fancy Archives have been tested and load proved to be an issue for this user.
- The ability to include pages in reverse chronological order along with regular posts in the feed of a blog. A plugin would be fantastic, a hacked feed generator could also be nice. Note: this is not about generating a feed for a single page but including pages in the regular WordPress feed along with regular posts.
“new series of weekly posts”: fantastic!
Excellent. A new source of plugin ideas. 🙂
The King Text Widget can be used to make the archive list in the sidebar (or anything in the sidebar) collapsible with a nifty-looking javascript effect. Since you can use them to put enter PHP directly through the widgets interface you can use the regular hooks and options to put exactly what you want for archives and such.
Nearly all of the sidebars on most the sites I run consist almost entirely of this one widget. Very versatile.
The widget site is:
http://www.blog.mediaprojekte......king-text/
There already is a code hack that makes your Archive list into a drop-down list. I have included it in all my themes as a widget that I have called “My Archives”. My website uses this widget for Archives. It would be a simple “cut and paste” to add it to the functions.php file for any theme to get the same widget.
If anyone is interested, my themes are at http://wiki.benched42.net/
Great idea Mark!
Sweet – that’s a great idea..
But, can you please not use
for half of your posts content? It may look fine on the blog.. but via most readers it’s painful. Just another idea. 🙂King Text sounds interesting, but I lack the PHP knowhow to use it. You see, my Webmaster is on hiatus for a while, so I’m struggling through this all by myself. I need some really clear step-by-step instructions to make this archive scheme work. Check http://www.macnightowl.com to see what it looks like, so maybe someone could advise me how to address this.
The key is that a shared hosting environment makes it difficult to use any plug-in that causes a memory spike, and Fancy Archives did its share 🙁
Peace,
Gene
For the archives problem, I can suggest Extended Live Archive
One thing that I would like to see (or it may be there and I just can’t see it), is a way to delete draft posts. Currently, I have to publish the draft before I can delete it. 🙁
My plugin Compact Archive offers a format that fits very nicely in a sidebar. Like all archive plugins it loads the database heavily but in conjunction with my Plugin Output Cache plugin the load only occurs whenever the blog is updated with new post or comments — the rest of the time the archive is loaded from a cache.
Including simple pages within the frontpage, nested within the chronological order of the posts is something I’d love to see!
John, your plug-in seems to have some possibilities, but I’m having some troubles making it work properly. I used your latest beta. Can you contact me privately (click on my name to bring up my site — and click on the Contact Us link to send me a private message) and assist? It does sound like something we can make happen with proper guidance, and you’ll have to give me lots of that 🙂
Peace,
Gene
I would love something like buttonsnap to be integrated into the core so that we plugin developers didn’t have to spend waste so much time just trying to get Editor buttons to work, and so it wouldn’t be broken everytime WP updates!
I think a ‘database’-esque plugin would be really useful. With reference to http://theundersigned.net/2006.....ase-lists/ – which isn’t actively being developed at the moment – this is something I feel would be a welcome addition to the Plugin section. So far I haven’t found anything that could do as per the database-list plugin suggests (perhaps I’m looking for the wrong keyword), so if anyone has any recommendations, I would love to hear them 🙂
I posted a reply but it got ate…
Gene, contact me via my website if you want help getting king text running (the contact form on your website is broken btw, clicking send just seems to refresh the page).
AND
John, you can delete drafts in wordpress easy. Just click on the draft from the write or manage tab, then when the draft loads down at the bottom of the write page, right above the preview is a button that says “Delete this post”, click that to delete the draft.
That stupid button is so hard to notice, I had to ask someone the same question before.
I am not sure what you mean by the first wish. There is an attribute that allows you to limit the number of archive links, shown. So my sidebar only has the last 6 months plus a full archive link.
Get older archives »
I optimized Fancy Archives to do just what you asked. After my updates, only ONE database query is run (same as for the built in WordPress function) if you want archives categorized by year and month but don’t want each individual post listed. The current version runs a database query to retrieved the complete list of posts for every month even if they will not be displayed. It also runs an additional database query just to compute the number pf posts per year, once again whether or not totals are being displayed. In my unofficial tests, it’s
Midwestern City Boy: Where’s the rest of your post? What about your unofficial tests, and where can I get a copy?
Peace,
Gene
Gene: I don’t know. Maybe only comments if a certain size are allowed. Anyway, the rest of the comment was …it’s less than 0.05s slower than the standard list_archive routine.
I’m running it on my blog but I haven’t published it anywhere yet. I will say it is MUCH faster and requires far fewer queries to create an archive list like you have on your sidebar. It only slows down when any combination of options which will list all of individual posts are selected.
Hi Mark… I posted this at Ajay’s place and he suggested that I contact you with my request as well. Here’s my issue:
Before I upgraded to WordPress Ella, I used a plugin called Easy Image Upload. It created a quicktag on the editor and made it VERY simple to add an image to a post. However, after the upgrade, the plugin no longer works and I really dislike using the included image system of Ella.
Unfortunately, the developer no longer seems to be updating that particular plugin. It’s probably a very simple quicktag code, but I don’t know how to do it myself. Would you please ask the WordPress community if anyone would be willing to recreate this plugin for me and others who relied on it? I’d appreciate it very much!