During the MooseCamp session “WordPress and your problems” I promised to look into a few items that we were discussing, and report back to the group. I’ve finally made some time to dig around, and here’s the goods.
Nancy White asked some questions about tweaking her WordPress site, and they were all things that sounded really good, but that I didn’t know how to implement.
- Automatically tagging new posts on the WordPress site on del.icio.us – not sucking del.icio.us tags into WordPress, or listing latest sites tagged, but automatically bookmarking each new post (with categories and tags applied as in the WP post) in a way similar to the Twitter Tools plugin’s broadcasting of new posts. I haven’t found any way to do this, but am still looking.
- Hierarchical menu display – how to have expandable/collapsible menus within the WordPress site?
- Use del.icio.us as a source of tag autocompletion within WordPress? The idea is that there should be a canonical set of tags that a person can use for all of their tagging – blog, flickr, del.icio.us – and that it would be great if WordPress could use a person’s del.icio.us tags as the source for an autocompletion while tagging new blog posts within WordPress. I haven’t found anything that does this, but know a BUNCH of people would be smiling if something could be found.
- How to add a link to an external website as part of the main page menu structure? it’s possible to hack a theme to add links this way, but not in the middle of the menu. I’ve found the WordPress Menubar Plugin, which looks close, but am still wondering if there’s a more mainstream way to do this.
Thanks for the follow up, D’Arcy. Now, if you wish a tool, does it come true? (Pretty please, I hope so!) I’ll check the Menubar plugin.= and the menu display options.
Hey Norman – “del.icio.us as a source of tag autocompletion within WordPress” – I am SO filling the patent on that right now and am gonna SUE yer ass off.
Kidding. I truly hope some reading your blog takes the initiative and codes this up, as I will gladly use it if they do, and if everyone had to wait for me to do it, it could be a long (read “interminable” or “never ending”) wait.
well… YOU’RE a reader of this blog… And it was your idea… Please provide the download link to the WordPress plugin 😉
seriously, though, I agree that it would be soooo cool if there was a way to expose tags via an API that let all kinds of apps use them as a canonical list. I’d love to use my del.icio.us tags as the starting point for every app I use – and when made round-trip via a robust API it would be pretty close to ideal. Of course, Nancy’s wish for a blog-to-del.icio.us-automator would fill that round trip with little extra work…
Ultamate tag warrior used to do something similar by pulling down tags from yahoo. They stopped development when WordPress drastically changed the way they did their tagging in version 2.3.
page digged
In regards to question #4, After reading this, I wrote a quick Redirector. Create a Page with the name of the link you want, then add a Custom Field called “redirect” and make the value the url of the page you would like to go to. when you click the link in the menu, it will redirect the page to the url you specified before displaying anything on the screen. It’s seemless. enjoy.
Plugin info:
Plugin Name: Custom Field Redirector
Plugin URI: http://www.vacubomb.com/wp-plugins/CFRedir.zip
Description: Redirect to an external page when a “redirect” Custom Field exists on a page.
Version: 1.0
Author: Wes Koopmans (vacubomb)
Author URI: http://www.vacubomb.com/
PS, this is the first place i’ve posted it. I wrote it for my brother, as he was running into the same problem.
Wes, that’s awesome. And pretty much exactly meets the needs described by Nancy. It’s not a direct link to the external site, but the end result is the same. Thanks!
On point #1…
The very best solution is to first sign up for Onlywire and as many of the Bookmarking services it supports as you care for (Delicious is one of them).
Then install this WordPress plugin: http://www.lionstarr.de/onlywire-autosubmit-a-wordpress-plugin.html
I think it may need more refinement, thought… interested in your thoughts 🙂
-Alister
Alister Cameron // Blogologist
http://www.alistercameron.com
Hi Darcy,
Chris Garrett suggested I may want t to look into the auto posting to Delicious. I’ve been working on a pet project to run the blogroll from Delicious for cross blog stuff and it would share a good chunk of the code.
So I’ve just finished polishing a little plug-in called WP_DeliciousPost you can find it here.
http://www.dcoda.co.uk/index.php/downloads/wordpress/wp_deliciouspost/
It does pretty anything I could think of but any feedback is welcome 🙂