WordPress Archive

I’ve been working on a little WordPress project these last few weeks with a colleague. When I first heard the idea, I thought, “That should be easy enough to build.” I decided the best way to tackle the feature would be a custom widget, but when I finally sat down to get it working I quickly began to realize that there were a few obstacles to overcome.

The project was really meant to extend an existing widget, and it seemed confusing to have both the default and extended version there side by side (plus it would be really nice to call them the same thing for transparency). I needed to get rid of it. You can’t just overwrite an existing widget by registering a new one by the same name - WordPress ignores it. And if I did manage to find a way to remove a default widget, when do you have to do it?

I received an email this evening from Dan, who uses the Page Link Manager, wondering how to get a home page link to show up in his site navigation. I had never really thought about the problem, or even realized it was a problem until I started my search for a solution. There’s not much out there covering the issue besides a few forum posts at WordPress.org. But it’s an issue, nevertheless. I understand that the blog’s heading is supposed to link to you home page, but I believe there’s a large audience of Internet users, and potential readers, that wouldn’t think to look to a heading for a shortcut back to your home page.

With the recent release of Page Link Manager v0.3, it has been added to WordPress.org.
I’ll still be hosting and supporting the plugin here for any of you that like to go straight to the source, but I’m hoping it will be easier to find and discover by other WordPress users over on the plugin site.

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.

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.

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.