JumbleCat WordPress Plugins: Update 6

[sc:wordpress-category ]This is another post in an ongoing series of articles here at JumbleCat about the plugins I find useful for WordPress.

The first four were:

  1. Happy 1st Birthday JumbleCat! AKA WordPress Plugins!
  2. Total Backup for WordPress
  3. Some More WordPress Plugins
  4. Even More WordPress Plugins
  5. JumbleCat WordPress Plugins Update

It’s hasn’t been long but there have been a few changes worth mentioning.

Plugins Added:

Custom Windows Pinned Tiles

Plugin’s Description: With Custom Windows Pinned Tiles 2, you can set up your site to display beautiful live-updating tiles in a matter of seconds.

Windows 8 brought live tiles to Windows and websites can support them with a bit of HTML.  This plugin adds the required HTML and even supports using your RSS feed to update the status of the live tile on a recurring basis.

Simple Feed Stats

Plugin’s Description: Tracks feeds, displays subscriber counts, custom feed content, and much more.

It’s a little simple and doesn’t exclude robots from the stats, but it does provide some useful view of how many subscribers you have to your blog through RSS.

Simple Local Avatars

Plugin’s Description: Adds an avatar upload field to user profiles. Generates requested sizes on demand, just like Gravatar! Simple and lightweight.

I have been using the “User Avatar” plugin since the start of my blog and it’s a good plugin, however it hasn’t been updated for WordPress 3.8 and it was getting kind of annoying.  The issue is that it uses a floated “div” to display your profile picture in your profile page and with the new admin color scheme’s layout it obscured some of the color schemes.

Simple Local Avatars does everything that User Avatar did but uses the standard WordPress API to add a section to the profile page, avoiding any conflicts in the future as well.

WordPress phpinfo()

Plugin’s Description: This simple plugin adds an option to an adminstrator’s Tools menu which displays standard phpinfo() feedback details to the user.

I had been using a plugin to do this for a while but it added a top level menu item, which as it was only a once in a while thing was a little obtrusive.  This plugin adds it’s menu item under tools, which seems more logical.

Plugins Removed:

User Avatar

Plugin’s Description: Allows users to associate photos with their accounts by accessing their “Your Profile” page.

I removed this plugin and replaced it with Simple Local Avatars as per above.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu

Plugin’s Description: All admin links available in a neat horizontal drop down menu. Saves lots of screen real estate! For WordPress 3.5+

This has been a staple of my blogging life since I started with WordPress, the old menu system in pre 3.8 WordPress wasn’t very good and took up too much room.  However with 3.8 this plugin doesn’t quite work as it did.  The icons are missing and there doesn’t seem to be an update coming any time soon.

So while it surprised me, I found myself disabling it and finding the new WordPress admin screen much better than before and I didn’t miss it at all.

If your still interested in this kind of horizontal menu, you might want to check out “WP Top Navigation“, which look interesting but I’m not using at the moment.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam

Plugin’s Description: Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress forms for comments, registration, lost password, login, or all. This prevents spam from automated bots. WP, WPMU, and BuddyPress compatible.

This had been my go to plugin for avoiding spam user registrations, however the CAPTCHA is too simple and the bots have worked out how to get around it now.

Instead I’ve enabled re-CAPTCHA in Pie Register, which has gotten around a lot of the spam.  I also enabled email verification in Pie Register which has caught most of the remaining ones.

WordPress Admin Menu Links

[sc:wordpress-category ]One of the things I really get annoyed at with the WordPress Admin menus, is that going to the toolbar and selecting one of the WordPress sites or even “Visit JumbleCat” will load that page in the current window instead of a new one.

Normally I would expect that kind of content to load up in a new browser window so I don’t leave my current page.  There’s no place in WordPress to control this, but with a little work it can be fixed:

  1. Install the “Add Admin JavaScript” from the plugin directory.
  2. Activate it.
  3. Go to “Settings”->”Admin JavaScript”.
  4. Under “Admin JavaScript (in footer)” add the following JavaScript:
jQuery('#wp-admin-bar-wporg > a.ab-item').attr("target","_blank");
jQuery('#wp-admin-bar-documentation > a.ab-item').attr("target","_blank");
jQuery('#wp-admin-bar-support-forums > a.ab-item').attr("target","_blank");
jQuery('#wp-admin-bar-feedback > a.ab-item').attr("target","_blank");
jQuery('#wp-admin-bar-site-name > a.ab-item').attr("target","_blank");
jQuery('#wp-admin-bar-view-site > a.ab-item').attr("target","_blank");

The jQuery selector breaks down like this:

  • “#wp-admin-bar-???” identifies which menu item to change.
  • ” > ” tells jQuery to look for a child item (the menu items are html “li”‘s, but the actual link is an “a” tag inside of the “li” so we need to change the child item, not the parent).
  • “a.ab-item” looks for any “a” tags with a class of “ab-item”.

Once we’ve selected the right “a” link, we add an attribute to it to for the target to be _blank.

The six items select are the 4 external links to WordPress in the WordPress menu as well as the site menu along with the visit site menu item.

If you’d instead like to make ANY link in the admin screen that are not links to another part of the admin pages to open in a new window, you can use the following code, again added to the  “Admin JavaScript (in footer)” section:

var root = (location.protocol + '//' + location.host + location.pathname).replace( /wp-admin.*/, "wp-admin");
jQuery('a').each( function() {
     if( this.href.indexOf( root ) == -1)
         {
         this.target = "_blank";
         }
 });

In this code:

  • The root var is built as “http://yoursite.com/wordpress/wp-admin/somefile.php” and then the “replace” strips off the “/somefile.php” so we’re left with a link to the admin pages only for your site.
  • The jQuery then selects every “a” tag on the page and executes the inline function .
  • The inline function first looks to see if the root string is in the href of the link, if not it adds the target as _blank.

Theoretically this could fail to catch an external link that is passing the admin page in the URL, but that seems unlikely to happen.

 

 

WordPress Admin 3.8 Color Scheme

[sc:wordpress-category ]WordPress 3.8 has a major change in the admin interface and the color scheme is part of it.  But what if you like the more traditional WordPress colors?

I’m sure there will be some plugins that offer more color scheme’s in the near future, but what until them?

My solution was pretty easy:

  • Install and activeate the “Add Admin CSS” plugin
  • Go to Appearance->Admin CSS
  • In the Admin CSS box, enter the following:
#wpadminbar { background-color: #474747; }
#adminmenuback, #adminmenuwrap, #adminmenu { background-color: #474747; }

This will lighten up the menu background and be more like the traditional WordPress 3.7 color scheme.

 

WordPress 3.7/3.8

[sc:wordpress-category ]WordPress 3.7 was released a while ago and 3.8 is just about here, both provide significant, if differently focused, updates to how WordPress runs.

WordPress 3.7

3.7’s big new feature was automatic updates.  I’ve been using the Automatic Updates plugin for quite a while and it’s nice to see it integrated in to the core.  However there are a few things I have to scratch my head on:

  • Why no user interface to control updates.  The plugin had one, it seems an odd exclusion, especially since it just forced a dozen plugins to appear to take care of the issue.
  • With the plugin, when an update was available it was pretty much immediately installed, the new core code seems to wait quite a long time before it installs it.

It would have been nice to have some advanced features for automatic updates built-in to core instead of relying on plugins.

WordPress 3.8

3.8 has some big changes to the admin UI and in general they look pretty good.  I’m not a big fan of the included color scheme’s they have selected and again they seem to have left out any kind of editor to allow for custom theme’s, but it is a step forward.

This seems to be a common theme with the core, it tends to leave out some of the things that would make WordPress more user-friendly, preferring to leave that to plugins.

That may or may not be a good strategy, but when your primarily known as a publishing platform, it kind of seems to me to be important to keep your users in mind when adding new features.

JumbleCat WordPress Plugins Update

[sc:wordpress-category ]This is another post in an ongoing series of articles here at JumbleCat about the plugins I find useful for WordPress.

The first four were:

  1. Happy 1st Birthday JumbleCat! AKA WordPress Plugins!
  2. Total Backup for WordPress
  3. Some More WordPress Plugins
  4. Even More WordPress Plugins

It’s been a while so I thought it was time to update what I’ve added and removed.

Plugins Added:

Add Admin CSS

Plugin’s Description: Interface for easily defining additional CSS (inline and/or by URL) to be added to all administration pages.

In the previous list of addons I included Ozh’s Admin Menu settings which let’s you convert the left hand admin menu to a drop down menu style.  I use the Add Admin CSS addon to add a bit of custom CSS to make the admin menu look flat, so from:

Admin CSS Disabled Sample

To:

Admin CSS Enabled Sample

Admin Post Navigation

Plugin’s Description: Adds links to navigate to the next and previous posts when editing a post in the WordPress admin.

This is handy if you want to move between posts without having to go back to the post list.  Just one of those little plugins that are useful in certain circumstances and probably should be part of the core WordPress install.

BAW Post Views Count

Plugin’s Description: Count views for post and pages.

This is just a simple little page view counter, quite easy to use and adds a column to the posts list in the admin menu with the view count.  It also can exclude views by logged in administrators.

Just Writing

Plugin’s Description: Adds buttons to the Distraction Free Writing Mode for all kinds of extra functions.

Distraction Free Writing Mode is nice, but really limited, this plugin gives it a bit more functionality.

Shutter Reloaded

Plugin’s Description: Darkens the current page and displays an image on top like Lightbox, Thickbox, etc. However this script is a lot smaller and faster.

A nice little plugin to make screen shots and other images pop up over the current page instead of a new window or replacing the existing one.

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

Plugin’s Description: See which plugins are slowing down your site. Create a profile of your WordPress site’s plugins’ performance by measuring their impact on your site’s load time.

This is a great performance tools, but I keep it disabled normally and just check the site every once in a while to make sure nothing is going wrong.

Pie Register

Plugin’s Description: Enhance your Registration form, Custom logo, Password field, Invitation codes, Paypal, Captcha validation, Email verification and more.

I don’t use even a fraction of the functionality of this plugin, but I do use it to put up a user notification during login that dormant accounts will be deleted after 60 days.

Schedule Posts Calendar

Plugin’s Description: Adds a javascript calendar to the schedule posts options.

Something that has always seemed missing from the WordPress admin interface for creating new posts was a way to schedule them with a popup calendar.  This plugin lets you do that and also adds a quick link to the posts list so you can reschedule a post without opening it.

Shortcoder

Plugin’s Description: Shortcoder is a plugin which allows to create a custom shortcode and store HTML, Javascript and other snippets in it.

A while ago I decided to jazz up my posts with an image indicating the category they were in, but I didn’t want to hardcode the media so I use this plugin to insert the image in to the post.  That way if I change a category image all I have to do is update the shortcode and all related posts will automatically be updated as well.  There might be a better way to do this, but it seems to work well so I’m happy with it.

WordPress Statistics

Plugin’s Description: Website statistics tracking.

I’ve been using BAW Post Views Count for quite a while and it does provide a good view of what posts are being read, but that’s all it does.  WordPress Statistics takes it a step farther and give a detailed view of all the hits on your site.

Plugins Removed:

Admin Customization

Plugin’s Description: Allows you to customize basic aspects of your WordPress backend This plugin simply adds several options that probably should be in the base WordPress control panel but aren’t.

I removed this plugin quite awhile ago and I can’t honestly remember if WordPress simply added the features I was look for or it fell out of support and stopped working.  Either way it’s gone from JumbleCat now.

GTranslate

Plugin’s Description: Get translations with a single click between 58 languages (more than 98% of internet users) on your website!

This was a nice plugin, but Google broke it and I haven’t found a replacement yet.

WordPress Editorial Calendar

Plugin’s Description: The Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog.

I used this for a while but it had quite a few bugs and didn’t really provide a very good user interface.  For my uses Schedule Posts Calendar replaced this.