October 2006 Archive

Wordpress is a fantastic tool - I can’t say that enough. I was able to migrate my old site and structure over to the Wordpress model quite quickly, and in a matter of minutes I was blogging. But one of the major hurdles is that it still relies on coding knowledge a bit. For example, under the current version of Wordpress, to exclude a pages from site navigation, you have to go into the source and do something like wp_list_pages('exclude=3,7'). And, if you add other pages you don’t want listed in the site navigation, you have to go into and edit the source each time. This became an obstacle recently when my sister and I began looking at Wordpress as a viable content management system for clients’ use. It seemed silly to us that each time the client wanted to include an excluded page or exclude a new page they’d have to call on us, or we’d have to teach them some elementary programming skills. And so the Page Link Manager Plugin was created.

Get connected! Since lauching the Page Link Manager Plugin earlier this week, a lot of people have asked if it will work with such-and-such a plugin. And although I’d love to go through and try to get it to work with as many other plugins as I can, that’s just not possible. So, I’ve decided to write and release some functions to the development community. That way, if you want to get your plugin to work off some of the functionality of the Page Link Manager, it should be pretty painless.

For the next release of the Page Link Manager (v0.3), I’d like to add some localization to the plugin (especially with all the international attention it’s received).

I’m a guy who thinks that Wordpress wouldn’t be the success it is without the community involvement around it. So, I’m currently looking for some volunteers to help translate some of the output the plugin produces. It’s pretty much just small, but important, things like page headings and form labels and instructions. I’d like to get as many translations as possible for this next release, and I’m open to taking any localizations people are willing to provide.

The motivation behind this plugin is the fact that excluding categories is somewhat of a barrier to those of us who are not programmers. It used to be that we would have to dig through PHP templates and add exclude=2,7 to the wp_list_cats tag. To clients or anyone not familiar with the Wordpress system, that may seem like an impossible task. And, for those who are comfortable with the Wordpress system, it can be just plain annoying. The Category Link Manager attempts to make things just a little bit easier.