A few weeks OK, in Britain, a court ruled that a woman, who’s job it was to carry out marriages at a registry office, was entitled to opt out of performing doing her job if the ceremony was a civil partnership (gay marriage) as a result of her religious views. I am not intending to debate the rights or wrongs of that decision, but it did get me to thinking about support requests relating to websites where you disgree with the message.

Image you write an ass-kicker of a theme or plugin and there is a fair amount of take up. Someone contacts you and politely asks for you help because they are having problems with your plugin on their site. When you visit the site you find out that the point of the site is the promotion of a religious or anti-religious agenda that you find distateful, perhaps even offensive, although the person is not enciting violence or anything illegal.

I choose religion purely because it seems to stir up the most passion in both sides.

The question is: do you help him or her to fix their site or do you decline, ignore them, or any other variation thereof?

I have provided help to people even though I didn’t like the message or the point of their site, and to date I haven’t found one that has promted me to consider doing anything else. Perhaps I am just too nice a guy. But I can understand why someone would not want to put their spare time to helping further an agenda that was not their own. How about you?

[context_count_graph background_fill="efefef" count_individuals="true" direction="h" width="450" height="10" title="Help Them?"]

The inexorable drive toward improvement (dare I say perfection?) that characterises the WordPress project is not only a source of benefit, but also one of the main causes of difficulty and complaint. When WordPress 2.5 was released people complained about the new interface. At every release people complain that there are too many upgrades. Surely WordPress is good enough already?

It seems to me that WordPress is heading in a direction. I am not confident in the destination, intended or otherwise, but each new feature adds complexity and takes WordPress further from the ‘dead simple, gets things done’ WordPress that initially attracted me.

My first attraction to WordPress was a direct reaction against enterprise content management systems that are rediculously over specified and restrictive, and their open source cousin Joomla, so naturally I want to WordPress to keep its place as their oposite.

To an extent, that means reigning back the new features and considering how the system operates. What I would really like to see is the modularisation of the core. I would like WordPress to be a shell featuring user management, URL management, and a blank admin panel, into which each feature inserts itself in the same way as plugins add themselves.

This means that every feature (or combined features where absolutely necessary) sits in its own folder and can be deactivated, replaced or even deleted without any ramifications except the loss of that feature.

I think Backpress will help with this, but I don’t think it will ever happen. The attraction of adding new features is a strong one and far more interesting than altering parts of the code that most people never touch, or even see.

WordPress already meets my needs as a user. There is nothing more I need or want. Security patches aside is there really any need to add anything else?

I’ve disliked the design I produced for this site pretty much since the day I launced it. It wasn’t so many things that I wanted it to be, but it was functional and so it stayed. But no more.

I have done what, a few short months ago would have been unthinkable: I have used a third-party theme instead of building my own.

It is unlikely the theme will stay intact for long. In-fact the CSS has already been changed a little to help modify the navigation and will probably change more in the coming weeks. I also need to change the colours from blue to purple, as purple is the colour I used before.

Seeking Testers

The navigation on this site operates using the Fun with Sidebar Tabs plugin. So much of that plugin has changed recently so now it can do much much more. With that though comes responsibilities, so I am looking for a few people to test the new version.

But what does it do?

First of all I have added an option to calculate the number of tabs displayed according to height instead of width. This means opens up much more potential, something you will soon see on the home page of this site.

Secondly I have added an option which prevents the javascript redistributing some of the contents. This means that accordian tabs are now possible. I will also be including some of these on this site in due course.

Third: I have added a rotation feature that rotates through the tabs, and tab levels, displaying the contents of each one. There are 5 possible speeds.

Lasty, and most important by far, is the template option. The new version includes an option to load the CSS from a template. This means that you can offer your tab designs out to others to use. I will be producing some basic templates to begin with that people can use and modify.

I’m quite excited about this release, there is a little more work to go finishing some defaults, but it is nearly there.

If you are interested in testing out the latest version of the fun with sidebar tabs plugin then please drop a note in the comments (Wordpress 2.5+ is required).

Before attending WordCamp last weekend I was having second thoughts about my involvement in WordPress. Developing plugins isn’t an easy job and the problems always seem to arise when you planned to do something else. WordCamp changed my mind though to the extent that I am quite excited about the Fun with Sidebar Tabs updates that are coming soon.

I don’t want to go into the new features too much but I will say that they will make the plugin much more flexible, and at the same time much easier for the casual user who doesn’t have the knowledge of CSS to get the most out of it.

I do however have a question for any users of the plugin. I want URLs of the best implementations of tabs that you have found. If you want your tabs to look like something you have seen let me know.

The time has come for a new update to the my plugin generator; there are new things for 2.6 that need to be included. But at the same time I have been considering changeing the way the plugins work a little bit.

Right now the plugin generator creates code that is all contained within a single class. There are good reasons for this but I would like to abstract some of the code away so that it doesn’t need to be dealt with.

What I am considering is creating a small class library to accompany the plugin template that contains a lot of the code that interacts with WordPress.

To give you an idea of how this would work, instead of creating a function to load and save the plugin settings you would create a new settings class and pass it the name of the settings file. The rest would be dealt with within the class.

Now this is fine when it comes to writing my own plugins, but I honestly have no idea about the level of knowledge and experience that the users of the tool have. Nor do I know how much of the code is amended after it is generated.

So here is my question for anyone that has used my plugin generator, or might use it: Would you be comfortable with this? with a plugin template that comes with a class library?

My most popular plugin is Fun with Sidebar Tabs and it is easy to see why: it provides functionality that is much in demand. For that reason I have decided to devote a few posts to looking at alternative ways of styling the tabs to help users fit it to their theme more readily.

For the first post I am going to use this site as an example; I use Fun with Sidebar Tabs for the tabbed box on the home page.

I have am using the default WordPress theme and starting with a tabbed sidebar using the default settings.

To change the styling I am only going to use the widget options. To access these click edit on the sidebar widget. There are five blocks of CSS in these options labelled:

• Amend the position of the tabs
• Overide the Tabs CSS
• The Selected Tab
• Tabs Hovered Over
• Tab Content Container

The first change is to create the background for the tabs. For this I will change the CSS in the first box (Amend the position of the tabs). I will add four lines:

background-color:black;
width:1989px;
height:24px;

This alters the sidebar to look like this:

The next change is to Overide the Tabs CSS. Change:

font-size:10px;
line-height:1;
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
color:#000;
padding:5px;
border:1px solid #ccc;
background-color:#eee;

To:

font-size:12px;
line-height:1;
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
color:#fff;
padding:6px;
background-color:#000;

This increases the text size, removes a border, and increases the padding to compensate, in order to make the tabs the same height as the background. The background colour is changed to the same colour as the background and the text changed to white.

You also need to alter The Selected Tab from:

border-bottom:1px solid #fff;
background-color:#fff;

to:

background-color:red;

The effect of these change is a tabbed sidebar that looks like this:

The last change is to resolve the problem with the image above. The hovered over tab hides the text, so you can change the CSS for Tabs Hovered Over to:

background-color:#660000;

I will leave you to discover impact of this final change.

This CSS pretty much describes the CSS used on this blog, but with one exception. Instead of the background colours I have used the images shown below.

If you use the Fun with Sidebar Tabs plugin and have modified the styling then please leave a comment. I don’t get to see many examples of it in use and I would love to see more.

There are loads of frameworks in the world, even more if you look at non-PHP frameworks, and they all try to address the funademental requirements for application development. For serious development work these frameworks can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, but if you just want life a little easier why not try WordPress?

What are they key things that you want a framework to accomplish for you? Off the top of my head:

• User registration and login
• Database abstraction
• Application structure e.g. Model-View-Controller
• URL structuring
• Image manipulation

With a little thought, and by thinking in a different way, WordPress can accomplish these things for you, and more.

The combination of plugins, themes, and core files can be used to create a really nice separation of data and presentation. It requires a little thought beforehand as to where you draw the line between the two, but it is up to you how much separation you want.

User management is already included and a simple plugin to redirect users once they have logged on can prevent access to the admin interface so that users get a seamless experience.

URLs can be dealt with ina number of ways. You can use WordPress pages and shortcodes to add the apps functionality. This allows backend control over the page content and lets you set and change the URL for any pages you want. Alternatively you can write another plugin to create new URL structures that direct to custom theme pages.

If you use posts to hold each entry then you can use the optional permalink structures and single post pages to display the information with very little coding at all. The ability to add custom fields means you need never even touch the database directly, relying instead on built in post functions, you can use the existing template tags, search and archives, and you can allow comments on items without any coding.

Finally, WordPress posts have support for both categories and tags, and contains some of the major user interface frameworks that can be used to interact with these. These can be searched, sorted or Add a simple plugin, such as my Fun with Categories plugin that allows posts to be filtered by two categories and it is easy to see how an application can be develop pretty quickly.

There are, of course, things that WordPress is missing. It doesn’t make use of PHP 5 features such as the improved OOP features, but there is no reason why you cannot use these yourself if you don’t intend to release your code to the wider public.

There are lots of posts showing sites that you wouldn’t clock as WordPress based, but are there any applications? The next time I want a quick and easy application, I will certainly be looking at WordPress first.

I have just uploaded the latest version of my Fun with Photo Data plugin.

The newest update now allows you to add EXIF data to every post in a specific category, automatically.

It also presents the data according to normal conventions, for example, using 1/250 instead 0.004 for shutter speed.

Full details of version 1.1.2 are available from the Fun with Photo Data plugin page.