labs.dagensskiva.com

This weekend we’re having a More Plugins Dev Camp in Örebro, Sweden.

The plan is to release More Types 1.0, More Taxonomies 1.0, and More Fields 2.0 before the weekend is over.

To tease a bit we’re implementing template tags for More Types, More Taxonomies, and More Fields to make it easier to use and work with the plugins in your theme work.

For our flagship plugin, More Fields, we’re also implementing some HTML5 features for input type="nn". We know that most browsers won’t be able to make much of them for now, but in time they will and we will be ready.

With these features you can create fields that only recognises numericals, a range, a colour, a date, a time or datetime.

We’ll see you on the other side.

Update

The weekend is over and still no new releases yet. But I thought I’d give you an update on what we’ve been up to.

We’ve made another rewrite of how More Plugin handle different types of Post types, Taxonomies and Custom fields, which required some significant structural changes within the plugins. Now we’ve separated items within the plugin to make it easier to distinguish between different types.

For More Types the admin page is separated into:

• More Types Post types
  Post types created with More Types or has been imported from other sources.
• Saved More Types Post types
  Post types from files created with More Types.
• Post types defined elsewhere
  Post types created with functions.php or other plugins.
• Default Post types
  Built in post types.

The functionality is inherited bottom up, that is:
If you have the same Post type defined in Saved More Types Post types as in a Post type defined elsewhere the settings from Saved More Types Post types will override the settings from Post type defined elsewhere. Do you guys think that’s the correct order of things?

Expect GM versions posted to the repository soon.

More Fields 2.0

The 21st of April we reached a milestone for More Fields with 40k downloads. We’re really proud of all the fantastic things you’ve created with our creation.

We’re celebrating this with revamping More Fields for WordPress 3.0 in its entirety.

What you’ll notice is that we’ve removed the page type functionality and made it into an entirely new plugin (More Types). But we’ve also integrated that plugin with More Fields in a, if we can say so ourselves, lovely way.

With this change More Fields works better if you only want the box functionality, but you can still do everything you’d like and even more with both of them together.

Remember that this is an early beta and it needs WordPress 3.0. But if you dare to use WordPress 3.0 you probably dare to use More Fields 2.0.

(The 2.0 branch will not be pushed onto the plugins repository until we get closer to the final release of WordPress 3.0.)

Download More Fields 2.0

More Fields 1.5

We’ve also pushed an update for More Fields for the 2.9 branch of WordPress in preparation for WordPress 3.0.

What More Fields 1.5 does is convert the boxes, fields and post types created with More Fields for later use with More Fields 2.0, More Types 1.0, and WordPress 3.0.

We’ve made the decision to go all out for the upcoming release of WordPress 3.0.

More Fields 2.0

More Fields is our flagship plugin. It’s been downloaded 38 000+ times from the WordPress repository and helped created a more CMS like experience of WordPress for sites like Harvard Gazette Online and one of Swedens largest music sites dagensskiva.com.

One of the features from More Fields that the users have requested and that we’ve implemented into the plugin is the ability to add additional Post types besides the built in Posts and Pages.

More Types 1.0

With WordPress 3.0 the functionality to create post types will be built into core so what we’ve done is to break this functionality out of More Fields. But we thought it would be nice to be able to simplify the creation of additional post types (you add them via actions in your themes functions.php file as default). And we’ve also simplified the way to manage user roles and their capababilities with the created post types. And since we’re developers too we realised that there need to be an option to export these types to help transitioning from a development site to a live site (if you work on a development server and deploy on the live site). (Btw, that functionality will also be added to More Fields.)

More Taxonomies 1.0

But we’re not done yet. More Types is not really complete without being able to control the taxonomies of the site. So we decided to create More Taxonomies. We realise that we could have built this functionality into More Types, but we thought we’d keep each plugin as focused as possible to let each one focus on what it does best. That way you don’t need to install all of them to use the functionality of just one of them.

More Roles 1.0

Finally we’ll publish a plugin that will let you manage roles and capabilities for the WordPress CMS.

By default WordPress has five user roles (Admin, Editor, Writer, Contributor, and Subscriber). You can use these roles to set how users will be able to create and edit content. With More Roles you’ll be able to be a lot more specific. You could for instance create a new role for a specific department in your organization and allow only them to post items in a specific post type.

Another function for roles is also to specify which role that can view specific content. In the planned development for More Roles 1.5 you will also be able to set which roles that can view a specific post.

More … or less

You could just install More Fields to add the ability to simplify the CMS experience. You could just install More Types to better be able to separate your different kinds of content in the WordPress admin. And you could just install More Taxonomies to for instance create a music database.

But the best experience will be when you install all of them, of course.

And they will integrate nicely with plugins from other authors if that’s what you crave.

Beta tester?

All our new plugins will be published in the WordPress repository as soon as they reach the beta stage, so you will be able to find them there. (Tentative release date for the beta of More Types is today, More Taxonomies and More Roles will be released during the weekend.)

The beta for More Fields 2.0 however will only be published here on our labs site until WordPress 3.0 gets closer to release (since the current users of More Fields will also get the update request for 2.0, even though they’re still on the 2.9 branch). If you’d like to beta test More Fields 2.0 before that, please say so in the forum.

Please use the forums for More Types, More Taxonomies, and More Roles for bug reports and questions.

We’ve been working hard this weekend at preparing More Fields 2.0 for the upcoming release of WordPress 3.0.

Our work has also resulted in a new plugin which will allow us to streamline the More Fields plugin to be able to better keep it updated with new WordPress versions.

We will also be preparing the release of More Fields 1.4 which will be the final release for the 2.x branch of WordPress.

We’ll let you know as soon as it’s done and posted to the repository.

We know we’ve neglected you for a bit, and we’re sorry about that. We’ll try to step it up and do better.

Please try the new version of More Fields (1.4b1) before we submit it to the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Download: More Fields 1.4b1

Please note that support questions should be discussed in the support forum, not in this comment thread.

Changed in this version:

copy wp-admin/js/post.js to wp-content/plugins/more-fields/post.js
wp-content/plugins/more-fields/post.js: Comment out line 234
wp-content/plugins/more-fields/post.js: Comment out line 235
wp-content/plugins/more-fields/post.js: Comment out line 236
wp-content/plugins/more-fields/post.js: Comment out line 237

Update

New version (Beta 2) with more compatibility with legacy branches (2.8).

Download: More Fields 1.4b2

Update 2: Beta 3

Download: More Fields 1.4b3

Implemented $wp_query->add_rule in $more_fields->generate_rewrite_rules:754, so that php calamity is avoided.

It has gone a little un-noticed here, but we’ve quietly slipped out More Fields version 1.2, compatible with the new admin revealed in WordPress 2.7.

Whilst the changes in the admin layout (2.7 is different from 2.6 which is different from 2.5), together with the rapid release cycle that WordPress adheres to, have been frustrating, but we are very pleased with the way things now stand, and we intend to keep More Fields current with new releases of WordPress.

The plugin can be downloaded from here.

Enjoy!

And lastly, a bashful call for donations — if you find this plugin useful for your commercial WordPress projects, a donation will ensure future development, essentially buying my time from off other projects. And will keep me plied with delicious beverages.

For some reason or other there are actions in WordPress that have translatable fields in them, so when these actions are used on other languages than English, they change. They are actions involving the $page_hook variable., e.g. admin_head-$page_hook. I ran into this problem when updating More Fields. The problem in the context of plugins is that the language is not loaded when the plugins are loaded, so that the needed translation is not available. To get around this, the actions requiring translation are called at the ‘admin_init’ action instead.

function mf_pre_queue_js () {
    add_action('load-' . sanitize_title(__('Settings')) . '_page_more-fields', 'mf_queue_js');
}
add_action('admin_init', 'mf_pre_queue_js');

I got help with this on the wp-hackers mailng list – a great source for WordPress insights.

>Try adding your actions on the init hook, I think that runs after
>the translatable stuff has been loaded and setup.

Correct.

Everything related to languages should be done at init or later, so that everything is loaded and any plugins that modify the content are loaded.

So, at the init/admin_init hook, we’re safe to assume that the appropriate language has been loaded.

I’ve just updated More Fields to version 0.6, compatible with WordPress 2.5.

New features:

• Compatible with the new admin introduced in WordPress 2.5
• Set default value in a select list.
• Enable right hand column boxes in WP 2.5.
• Option of removing the ‘Related’ links on the right hand side on the Write/Edit page.
• A new set of actions, enabling users to change the behavior of More Fields. The documentation has been updated to include an example on how to use these actions.

The plugin can be downloaded from wordpress.org.

Any feedback is always greatly appreciated.

Finally, having uhhmm’d and ahhrree’d about implementation, I’ve decided submit the 0.4 beta version of the ‘More Fields’ plugin to the Wordpress Plugins CVS server, else it might never happen.

You can find more information about the plugin here. I’m hoping to update the examples to reflect the current look of the plugin, albeit I’m still hoping for a redesign of the ‘More Fields’ admin for some future version.

You can download the plugin from Wordpress.org.

The plugin is a beta, which means it might be riddled with bugs and oddities that might sink your particular Wordpress ship. It is released under the GPL license.

As always, feedback and comments are always very much appreciated.

I’m quite exited to see this one out the door. There are another two proprietary plugins that we currently run on dagensskiva.com – one that handles the external links associated with posts, and one (sizable) ad-management system. I’m hoping that these will also be released shortly.