Labnotes

Want to post events on your blog? I wrote a WordPress plug-in that does just that. Here’s the screencast showing the plugin in action. It’s 4.68MB long and runs for 3:30.

Apparently, it’s not that complicated. Most of the smarts are in the UI: making it simple and intuitive to use, with simple AJAX to make up for JavaScript’s shortcomings (date/time validation).

The event I’m posting about is the SD Forums Microformats round table taking place tonight. And here’s the blog post about it (the same one I’m screencasting).

Update: Added a link to the uPress plug-in page.

WordPress 2.0 is out, along with a redesigned site.

I want to use this post to personally thank James of brothercake.com. James created DBX, used in the WP 2.0 editing page to add features without clutter:

Docking boxes (dbx) adds animated drag’n’ drop, snap-to-grid, and show/hide-contents functionality to any group of elements. And … in what might be another world-first for brothercake - dbx is fully accessible to the keyboard as well as the mouse, an action I’ve dubbed press ‘n’ move :-D

While working on a WP plugin for posting events, I found that DBX doesn’t get along with prototype.js. I e-mailed James, and he quickly came up with a fix, just in time to include it in the 2.0 release. So thanks James you for the quick fix, and Matt for the putting it in.

One of the best features in WordPress 2.0 is WYSIWYG post editing. It takes the pain out of formatting, linking and adding images.

WordPress 2.0 comes with a bunch of editing buttons, but not enough for what I need it to do. So I dug into the source code and found out there are hooks for adding more controls. After playing with it for a few minutes, I was able to add buttons for:

• Selecting formats: paragraph, formatted, headers, etc.
• Underline, subscript, super script, full justification.
• Copy, cut, paste.
• Insert table.
• Foreground color, background color.
• Character map.
• Full screen editing.

I created a simple plugin that automagically adds all these buttons. Download advanced-wysiwyg.php into your wp-content/plugins directory and activate. Enjoy!

PS: The table controls and full screen editing rely on additional TinyMCE plugins. So if you want these two features as well, you’ll have to download TinyMCE plugins and install those separately. For WordPress 2.0.4 users, try the TinyMCE 2.0 RC4 plugins. Or check the comments to find out what works for other people.

Update: I added two more filter functions. If you find that the toolbar is too wide, you can move the buttons to a second and even third toolbar (or add more buttons as you please).

Update: Thanks to Andy, we now have French support.