Ozh has written up a nice article on the new WordPress 2.7 Favorite Actions menu and puts out the call to developers to write a plugin that would automagically determine the favorite actions of a particular blogger and populate that menu with those options. That would be a truly useful plugin and I would love to see it. Now that we are talking about the Favorite Actions menu and we know that actions can be removed, is there going to be competition/confusion between plugin authors who want to add a link to their plugin’s admin page to the top of that menu? Anyone plan on writing such a plugin?
I recently talked about a tutorial on creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress and thanks to WPCandy, have now found a pretty slick plugin that mimics that feature and adds a lot more. Flutter lets your modify your write page and post screens to your liking and adds the ability to add custom content types and write panels to these screens. From WP Candy’s review and from the Flutter documentation, it appears that the plugin is not only under active development and quite complex and mature, it also has a lot of potential for the future. For those that are planning to use Flutter, please remember that it is still in beta and there are lots of broken features and options. Upgrades and uninstallations seem to be the most fraught with issues.
I disagree with your recommendation of Flutter. I don’t think you should recommend it without trying it yourself first. You are right to warn people in the last sentence that the plugin is full of bugs, including problems if you try to UNINSTALL it. However you are incorrect when you say that the plugin is “mature.” It is not. It is extremely ambitious. They’re trying to do so many different things with 1 plugin. I would guess it could be years until they fix all the bugs, if ever. This plugin has bit off more than its developers can chew, from all appearances so far in the last 3 months. Only experienced users should try this on your experimental blogs. I wouldn’t design a site that depends on this one, until it is much better developed and substantially completed.
I agree with Dgold – Flutter’s predecessor (FreshPost / FreshPage) was much better in my opinion. Flutter seems to have tried to do too much and I think they recognized that fact and pared away some of the functionality.
For my sanity I’ve discovered that Henrik’s More Fields and WP GoGo’s Custom Field Template link plugins offer good functionality without all the issues of sub plugin reliance as evidenced with Flutter.
Of course the Freshout team seems like they’re still trying to work it out, so I’m checking back in on them with every release. For now, “More Fields” fills the bill.
Yeah, I’m jumping on the “don’t recommend Flutter” band wagon too.
I think it will be great but, in my opinion, it’s just too to use buggy, atm.
I’m dreading the favourites menu. Not the functionality of it, but the fact the plugin authors can hook into it and add links. That is one thing that should have been left to the user. I don’t have that many plugins installed myself, but image someone with 20 – all of which decide to add a link to that menu!!
A better mechanism would be a way for the user to add whatever current admin page they are on to the favourites menu.
Flutter sucks. Why not make a really robust custom write panel plugin? No, they try to stick everything and the kitchen sink in there, and it fails as a result. Bloated, wasteful, destined to be poorly supported and eventually abandoned, it is everything the WP community does NOT need more of.
So let’s see, instead of fixing my WordPress bugs we need to fix Flutter bugs too.
Flutter developers problem is that they cannot keep track with all the updates and changes happening in WordPress. That’s why all the bugs and incompatibility problems.
From my experience if you want to come up with something good you’ll have to stick on the essentials.