Brass Blogs: Web Design & Development

Well hello there!

I’m all excited. I think I’ve mentioned before (although for the life of me I can’t find reference to it) that I wrote a quick plugin once to provide back end instructions for clients. It was using the Userextra/Usermeta plugins, and I edited/added text right in the plugin area to pull up the right stuff, so it wasn’t easily managed. It worked (and was a “quick fix”) – but I wanted it to be better.

My dream was to have it really easy for an administrator to manage, edit and remove instructions for clients. Bonus points for allowing video and/or audio content.

I finally pulled it off

So this plugin basically uses the new custom post types functionality that WP provides. It installs a new type, and you simply go in, write a post, tell it what page to show up in, and publish. There’s custom fields that you can use for various things – but in essence, it’s writing a post via WordPress that will publish in the back-end instead of the front. It uses jQuery so it “slides open” on demand to reveal the “instructables”, and on pages that don’t have instructions, there’s no indication of the plugin at all.

Now, this is not quite ready for an official release. Right now, I’m after testers to help me find and squish bugs. So if you’d like to download this and give it shot (and let me know how it goes for you) I’d really appreciate that.

You can download the files here: Back End Instructions for WordPress

Notes to go along with this:

• I’m still working on the stylesheet – so some of the output looks weird at the moment.
• If your WP install is in a subdirectory, you won’t see it working properly (I know why – I just have to fix it). This will work for installs in the root of your site.
• The only multimedia I’ve used with this is YouTube. I’d like to have other media tried – like vimeo, or Jing (working for Jing – at least the SWF files anyway!) – and have audio files, etc. tried out and see how that goes.
• I’m considering adding an admin page (or something) so you can easily uninstall this plugin. Deactivating it will still leave the content in your database, since it’s using native WordPress capabilities. I’m riding the fence on this, because in truth, all the plugin truly adds to your database is the little registration to let the system know it’s there. The rest is just posts – it’s just a custom post type. So if you deactivate the plugin, the posts/content remain, you just wont’ see them anymore. I’m leaning towards somehow changing the post type back to “post” so the content will show up in your regular post listing – because I keep thinking that people would want to remove the plugin, but keep the content. This is under debate – I’m not sure what the best way to handle it is.

So please, if you download this and try it out, please let me know how it goes! Thanks!

Update: 8/14/2010 I’ve actually been putting this to use today for a client’s site, and have found (and worked out) a few little bugs. I’m not finished, but I expect I’ll have the full plugin ready for serious scrutiny by Monday. I’ve finally checked the Jing capabilities, and even though the file you’re downloading right now doesn’t work with Jing, I’ve already gotten fixes in place that do. So watch for it on Monday!

Update: 8/16/2010 Okay, I’ve uploaded a new version this morning. I’m terrible, because I need to figure out how to let people know it’s been updated! I always forget to do that. But It’s now working with YouTube and Jing, but I’d still like to try it out on Vimeo and Blip.tv. I also worked out a bug/conflict that I ran into with Role Scoper, and I’ve edited it a bit so if you have role-specific instructions, it’ll hide them from lower-level users.

Update: 8/16/2010 @ 11:05 am Another update – the newest upload now contains internationalization, and I’ve cleaned up the code so the header stuff doesn’t get added to pages it doesn’t need to be added to. I’ve also added some commenting to make understanding the code better, and grouped certain functions into new files. Oh, and in the earlier update this morning, I’d forogtten to add the necessary Jing files – whoops! They’re in there now.

Update: 9/1/2010 @ 3:32 pm Per request, you can now add instructions for the dashboard. I’ve also cleaned up and reorganized the file system, so be careful when you upload. (There’s a readme file in there – pay attention to it!)