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.
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.
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.