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.

If you love tabs then you’ll love the beautifully styled Tabbed Widgets Plugin for WordPress.

Kaspars’s new tabs plugin not only allows normal tabs it also allows accordian style content, both with an option to loop through them at a specified interval.

Full details including screenshots and a screencast are available on Konstructors notes.