WordPress Adminimize and Latest Tweet Plugins
Just because the world hasn’t suffered enough bad PHP coding, I released two WordPress plugins today. One pares down some of the admin UI, and the other is a Twitter plugin. Because the world doesn’t have enough of those, either. You can find links to them on my WordPress Plugins and Hacks (but I repeat myself) page, or if you can go straight to their respective pages, which I’ll link here in just a second.
Okay, second’s up!
- MW Adminimize (currently v0.5)
-
This plugin pares down the page-topping links interface that shows up on every WordPress administration page. I got tired of seeing my blog name in Big Huge Letters all the time, and I kept forgetting that the “Dashboard” link was hidden up in that black bar. So I fiddled with some arrays and wrote some CSS, and got something that chews up less screen real estate while also being easier for me to use. Maybe you’ll feel the same, in which case, enjoy the plugin.
In addition to that, I pared down some of the elements of the “Write Post” page so that they took up a bit less space, and compressed the stuff around the post title’s input field. Those styles are marginally less stable and may cause weirdness for you. If so, sorry. Let me know what goes south and I’ll try to get it fixed in a future version.
Oh, and I also included a CSS rule that makes the background shading of moderated comments more obvious, though not in my usual eye-scarring fashion. It’s just a little darker and notably redder. That doesn’t have much of anything to do with minimizing the admin UI, but I thought it was a huge improvement. I might take it out in a future version if the crowd shouts otherwise.
- MW Latest Tweet (currently v1.0)
-
This one does what you’d probably guess: shows the latest tweet. Why not just use something like Twitter Tools? Actually, I tweeted about that. A further survey of the options available turned up nothing that was quite what I wanted. So of course I started hacking away.
The basic mechanism is that any time a page that calls this plugin is loaded, it either returns the last-cached tweet or asks Twitter for the latest tweets so it can cache the latest of them. If Twitter fails to respond (I know, what are the odds?), you still get the cached tweet. This is similar to SimpleTwitter, from which I took much inspiration, but is more advanced in a number of ways. Among the options I wanted to have and thus created was having “human time” intervals as an option, and also the ability to filter out @replies (because I personally wanted to display my latest broadcast tweet, not my latest reply). While I was at it, I decided I’d throw in the ability to define your own XHTML output, so that if the plugin failed there wouldn’t be partial or mangled markup shoved into your pages. Also, since I cache the whole of the latest tweet, you have all kinds of stuff you can output should you so desire. It’s all documented on the plugin’s page.
This is not a widget, because I’ve never written one and didn’t have time to learn (due to all the time I was burning just trying to write the plugin). You have to edit your template/web page PHP in order to call it. That’s just the kind of DIY guy I fly. Er, I am.
Also, I’m a wee tiny bit proud of how I styled the
labels on the plugin’s Settings page. I’ll probably write that up in a separate post.
That’s about it. If anything goes wrong or is unclear, please do let me know in the comments. Share and enjoy!
