Posts from Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

So after I once again published a post without filling in the excerpt, thus forcing me to go back to fill it in later, I tweeted in a fit of pique:

I need a WordPress plugin that won’t let me publish a post until I’ve filled in the excerpt field. Anyone got one?

To which I got a whole lot of responses saying, in effect, “Oooo!  Good idea!  I need that too!  Let me know when you find one!”  Some of them came from people running fairly high-profile blogs.  The need clearly exists.  A couple of responses were of the “I could do that!” variety, so I thought I’d post here so as to describe how I think it ought to work from the user’s perspective, and then we can hash things out in comments and someone can code it up and make everyone happy.

So really what I want is, when I push the “Publish” button in WordPress, the plugin checks to see if there’s an excerpt.  If not, one of two things happens:

1. The plugin throws up a warning dialog telling me that I’m about to post without an excerpt (again).  If I say “Okay”, it goes ahead with publishing.  If I say “Cancel”, it returns me right back to where I was, which is the “Write Post” page, with all the data intact and unaltered.

2. The plugin returns me to the “Write Post” page with all data intact and unaltered, and puts an error box at the top of the page telling me I forgot to write an excerpt (again) and that it won’t let me publish until I fix the problem.

One or the other.  I think I like #1 a little better, but I’d be good either way.  I’m open to other approaches as well, but I don’t think the plugin should rely on JavaScript, as that means leaving out people who don’t enable JavaScript or post from JS-incapable devices.

I would do this myself, but I’m a little wary of the “return to the page with all data intact and unaltered” bit, which I would imagine is pretty easy to mess up.  Thus I’m putting it up here as a semi-Lazyweb post so that someone else, someone with more experience with WordPress and plugin authoring, can do it right and quickly.

Okay, who’s on it?

• Wanted: Excerpt Exacter was published on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Tools and WordPress categories.
• There have been nineteen replies.

Just when you thought the whole embedded-video thing couldn’t get any worse, here I come with videos featuring, well, me.

The most recent is a short clip from one of my presentations at An Event Apart back in April, debug / reboot, where I comment at my usual pace on the suppression of quotation marks in my reset styles and why I think relying on browser-generated quotation marks is a bad idea.  You also get to see my hair before it got to be the length it is now, which is even longer.  There’s a complete transcription on that page, by the way, courtesy Mr. Z.

Then there’s the vaguely silly one, in which I attempt to debug my clothing while sitting in my living room.  The main takeaway here, I think, is that my speech patterns on stage are just about the same as those in “regular life”.  Pity my family.

So there’s me in the movies.  It’s nowhere near as epic-ly mëtäl as some other folks’ videos, but I suppose we all do what we can.

• Caught In The Camera Eye was published on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart, CSS, and Speaking categories.
• There has been one reply.