Clearskys.net Blog

My favourite functions - onpage

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Being the generous and kind-hearted person that I am, I thought that I would share some of the little tips, tricks and functions that I use or have found useful whilst developing WordPress plugins.

Most of these functions or code snippets have made it into a number of my sites or plugins - a few of them are even in the core library I include with all my projects now. That doesn’t mean, however, that they are completely error free or of any use to anyone other than me.

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How to make a more stylish search widget

An effective search facility is the most important functionality for a website. Whilst WordPress performs the nitty-gritty of searching very well, I have always felt that the default search widget is very basic in both looks and functionality.

This tutorial will take you through the steps required to create a more stylish search widget for your blog and maybe teach you a few little tricks along the way. It is written as a very basic tutorial so the more experienced amongst you may find the going a little slow. If you aren’t interested in the tutorial and just want the plugin, then just scroll down to the bottom of the page to grab the completed code.

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Back to the grind stone - a status update

Well, I’ve been away from the computer for a short while now (at least two months) and it has been fantastic and very much needed. The break has given me the chance to actually sit and make plans for 2008 and onwards rather than just responding to events as they happen. The only problem being my extreme optimism (I should register that as a new extreme sport) in what one person can achieve in a given time (and to handicap things further, what I can achieve in a given time).

On that note, I have a number of challenges which I will detail as they progress to their starting point, which I hope you will all appreciate and maybe even find it in your hearts to help or promote on your own sites. Could I be anymore secretive? Well yes, but you’ll understand later why I don’t want to announce these things without having the proper structure in place to handle things beforehand.

Short term updates

WordPress MU
In the next few days I shall be moving this blog (and a number of the other blogs that are on this server) across to WordPress MU.
Why? Well I originally moved from MU to standard WordPress over a year ago as I didn’t have enough blogs hosted to warrant the complexity of running a pre-release version of MU. I now have a much larger collection of blogs and sites running on WordPress and am actually starting to dread the thought of upgrading them all (even using svn). So as they have to be upgraded anyway, I thought that a single upgrade to MU should make my future life a lot easier, and mean I can add new blogs very quickly.

Update of plugins
I am aware that a number of my plugins currently don’t play nicely with WordPress MU or multiple user systems. These will obviously all have to be fixed as I need to use them on my own sites, so expect new releases of most plugins quite soon.

Plugin Factory
Going back to my earlier mention of promoting things without having the necessary structure in place first, the Plugin Factory, unfortunately, suffered because of this. From the moment I mentioned it on this blog my other workload increased overnight and I couldn’t find the time to devote to making the Plugin Factory a success. To those who have sent plugin requests, I apologise if you haven’t had a reply or we lost contact. I have a list of the requests that I will start to make my way through. If you submitted a request and never got a response then please submit again to show you are still interested.

Charity Work
More on this a little later, though I suspect that this will be taking up a large amount of my time in 2008 thanks mainly to the Extreme Optimism I mentioned earlier, my large mouth and an even larger amount of alcohol consumed one night over the christmas period.

Finally my thanks for everyone for their patience whilst I was away and a belated Happy New Year to all of you.

Rgds
Barry

MyDashboard release delay

I planned to post the news today that I would be waiting until the WordPress 2.4 release before the next release of MyDashboard.

I wanted to see what new functionality was being introduced for the Admin dashboard so that I could judge the best way forward for the future development of the plugin (and even whether it was still needed).

However, it would now appear that the scheduled WordPress 2.4 release has been skipped in favour of a 2.5 release in March.

So I guess some re-thinking is in order and I’ll have to go and re-arrange my schedule.