KP Design

WP Hide Dashboard: One Year In

Kim — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:00:50 +0000

Today marks the one year anniversary since I released the first version of the WP Hide Dashboard plugin.

The plugin started out as a hack to fill a need that I had on a website that I was developing. I tried the version that Thomas Schneider had released as an add-on to his Role Manager plugin, but it required that Role Manager be installed for it to work. This was the only functionality that I needed, so I set out to make it work on its own.

At the time I only planned to use it on my websites, but during the research that I had done for the fix, I found so many people who were needing the same thing and didn't want to bloat their WordPress install with an unneeded plugin just to obtain this functionality. That convinced me that I should release it publicly.

So I went to the wordpress.org Extend section on 10/18/2008, and applied for an account to set up the plugin on their repository. On 10/19/2008 my request was approved, and on 10/20/2008 WP Hide Dashboard was born.

Now, one year later, the plugin has been through four revisions since the initial release to add functionality and ensure that it continued to work with the latest version of WordPress. I have helped people rework the plugin to extend the functionality beyond the Subscribers role, including hiding other menu items for both WordPress core and other plugins. There have been some situations where I was unable to find a resolution for a user's issue, but the majority of issues have been resolved successfully.

Downloads for the plugin are currently at almost 10,800, and still climbing. The average number of daily downloads is around 30, with obvious spikes whenever a new version has been released. The image below shows the download stats from wordpress.org as of the time of this post:

To be honest, I never expected the plugin to have the response that it has. I knew that it was needed by some people, but to have almost 11,000 downloads in a year's time is awesome.

I plan to continue developing the plugin, and have already done preliminary testing on the nightly builds of WordPress 2.9 - so far, so good. I'll also be testing against the WordPress 2.9 Beta and RC versions when they are released, and will update the plugin if needed.

If you've used the plugin, like it, and would like to help me celebrate, head on over to the WP Hide Dashboard plugin page on wordpress.org and rate the plugin (there's only been 14 people give it a rating in all of those downloads).

Thank you to everyone who has downloaded and installed the plugin, blogged about it, linked to it, and supported it. You rock!

Until next time...

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WordPress, WordCamp Columbus and Friends

Kim — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:00:20 +0000

I have been excited about the opportunity to attend my first WordCamp ever since WordCamp Columbus was announced last December, and was among the group that was able to register for the free tickets when they were first announced.

The opportunity to meet and talk with other WordPress users and developers, as well as finally meet some of the wonderful people I talk with from the WordPress community made this a must-attend event for me.

Unfortunately, my good friend Murphy had other ideas about what I would be doing on May 16th.

About 2 weeks ago, while outside mowing, I pulled several tendons in my right foot. I've spent the time since trying to rest and get them healed up so that I could still go, but last Friday evening I realized that wasn't going to happen. Driving/walking were still quite painful, so I knew there was no way I'd be able to attend. Needless to say, I was very disappointed at having to miss WordCamp Columbus.

I let Alvin Borromeo (@wyliemac) and Jeff Chandler (@jeffr0) know that I'd be unable to make it via email Friday evening. Alvin is one of the organizers of WordCamp Columbus, so wanted to be sure he knew so that someone else could take my place, in case there was a waiting list to get in. Jeff and I have become friends over the past several months as a result of my participation in the WP Weekly podcast that he hosts at 8pm ET on Fridays. We had planned on meeting up at WordCamp, so I needed to let him know that I wouldn't be coming.

Fast-forward to Saturday morning. Watching the clock, knowing what I was supposed to be doing at that time, made it that much more difficult. I checked the WPTavern forum, and found a post from Jeff saying that he would use a forum thread and probably the chat box, along with Twitter, to provide updates throughout the day. Not the same as being there, but better than no info at all!

About 8:45am, Jeff decided to try and livestream the keynote presentation by Jane Wells via uStream. He got his webcam set up, video and audio up and working. Everything was coming through clear as a bell! I may not be there, but I'd at least get to see/hear it via the live stream.

I set up Seesmic Desktop to follow the #wccbus hashtag, as well as the #wordcampmidatl hashtag, so that I could track what everyone was saying about both events. The more info, the better!

Several other people showed up at the Tavern that morning - Kit Singleton, Ryan McCue, conorp - and we were all talking via the forum chat box, waiting for WordCamp to get started. Good friends, good conversation and WordCamp via live stream - hmmm, maybe this day wouldn't be so bad for me after all.

Then, good old Murphy decided to rear his ugly head once more. Just a few moments before the kickoff by Alvin and Jason to open up WordCamp, the internet went down completely at the facility, and the live stream disappeared. Not sure exactly why, but I would venture to say it may have been everyone trying to get online at the same time putting a strain on the wifi.

Unfortunately, the internet didn't recover until after Jane's keynote speech was over. But it did finally recover, and Jeff was able to livestream an advanced WordPress installs session being presented by Mike Krotscheck. He even managed to swing the webcam around a couple of times so that we could finally "meet" Will Anderson! lol

The internet finally stabilized enough that Jeff was also able to bring me the impromptu session in the main hall during the lunch break led by Lorelle VanFossen and Mark Ghosh, as well as Lorelle's session afterwards. He was even kind enough to show what was in the boxed lunch - sandwich, chips, apple and chocolate chip cookies - and let all of us know just how good the cookies were!

Between Jeff's livestreaming of some of the sessions, the tweets in the #wccbus timeline which provided links to other attendees' pics (like Mark Ghosh and Alvin Borromeo), Matt Mullenweg's Shoutout to WordCamp Columbus, presentation slides, and the unconference session notes, I was still able to be a part of the event.

Lorelle asked the question during the impromptu session "How has WordPress changed your life?". Here's my answer: WordPress has given me a solid platform to publish with, both on a personal level and for my clients. My involvement with WordPress has allowed me to be a part of a vibrant community of designers, developers and passionate users, challenged me to learn new things, and given me the opportunity to meet some wonderful people who have now become friends. Those friends bring something good to my life every single day, and I would never have met them without being involved with WordPress.

And some of those friends, through their kindness, helped to take a lot of the sting out of not being able attend WordCamp Columbus in person on May 16th. Thank you!

Until next time...

4000+ WordPress Plugins

Kim — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 13:36:35 +0000

After reaching the milestone of 4,000 plugins in the WordPress Plugin Repository, Matt Mullenweg formally declared January 28th as "Thank A Plugin Developer Day". As of right now, there are 4,021 plugins in the WordPress Plugin Repository, with a total of 20,433,740 downloads (and counting).

WordPress is a powerful publishing platform all by itself, but the available plugins extend that platform even further. The plugin developer community sees a need (or want) and go to work to create a plugin that fills that, be it simple or complex. They give their work to the WordPress community freely (for the most part) and put in long hours developing, supporting and maintaining those plugins.

If you have a favorite plugin (or two or three or five), be sure to stop by the developer's website, tell them "thank you" for all of their hard work, and maybe send a donation their way, if they have a "Donate" button on their site.

As my way of saying thanks, I've put together a list of the plugins that I use on this site, as well as a few that I use on other sites that I've developed. Without further adieu, here is the list:

Akismet by Matt Mullenweg
Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
Comment Relish by Justin Shattuck
Increase your readership and RSS subscription rate by simply sending a short "thank you" message to users when they first comment on your weblog.
Dagon Design Form Mailer by Dagon Design
WordPress plugin version of the secure php form mailer script.
Exec-PHP by Sören Weber
Execute php code in your posts, pages and text widgets.
FeedBurner FeedSmith by Feedburner
This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
Filosofo Comments Preview by Austin Matzko
Lets you preview WordPress comments before you submit them.
Hide Update Reminder by SarahG
Allows you to remove the upgrade Nag screen from view for Editors and below.
Lightbox 2 by Rupert Morris
Used to overlay images on the current page. Lightbox JS v2.2 by Lokesh Dhakar.
Page Link Manager by Garrett Murphey
Adds admin panel to choose which pages appear in the site navigation.
Page Menu Editor by SarahG
Allows you to customize the title attribute and menu label of each page link in wp_list_pages.
Peter's Login Redirect by Peter
Redirect users to different locations after logging in. Define a set of rules for specific users, users with specific roles, users with specific capabilities, and a blanket rule for all other users.
Plugin Info by John Blackbourn
Provides a simple way of displaying up-to-date information about plugins hosted in the WordPress Plugin Directory in your blog posts and pages.
postTabs by Leo Germani
postTabs allows you to easily split your post/page content into Tabs that will be shown to your visitors.
Post-Logger by whooami
Simplifies capturing $POST variables sent to any page within WordPress.
SEO Title Tag by Stephan Spencer (Netconcepts)
Search engine optimize your blog's title tags. Create a customized title tag for any post, static page, category page.
ShareThis by ShareThis and Crowd Favorite (crowdfavorite.com)
Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports email and posting to social bookmarking sites.
Simply Exclude by Paul Menard
Provides an interface to selectively exclude/include categories, tags and page from the 4 actions used by WordPress: is_front, is_archive, is_search, is_feed.
Simple Feed Copyright by Quick Online Tips
Adds a simple copyright notice at end of full text articles in your feed.
Subscribe To Comments by Mark Jaquith
Allow readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess.
Tangofy by Demetris
Better icons for the admin menu of WordPress 2.7. Select an included icon set (Fugue, Silk, Tango, Tango 2) or add your own!
WassUp by Michele Marcucci and Helene D.
Analyze your visitors traffic with real time stats, chart and a lot of chronological information. It has sidebar widget support to show current online visitors and other statistics.
WordPress Download Monitor by Mike Jolley
Manage downloads on your site, view and show hits, and output in posts.
WordPress Exploit Scanner by Donncha O Caoimh
Scans your WordPress site for possible exploits.
wpNamedUsers by Andrias Sundskarð
Intranet/extranet plugin that allows users to specify which users can access specific posts or pages.
WP-Syntax by Ryan McGeary
Provides code syntax highlighting in posts/pages using GeSHi supporting a wide range of popular languages

And there you have it - my tribute to the wonderful plugin developers whose hard work helps me extend the functionality of my WordPress installs. A huge thanks goes out to each and every one of them!

Until next time…

WordPress 2.7: One Million Downloads

Kim — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:51:51 +0000

Lorelle VanFossen at Lorelle on WordPress put out a challenge a few weeks ago to see who would get the screenshot when the WordPress download counter reached the one million download milestone.

At precisely 11:51am EST on 1/8/2009, WordPress 2.7 broke the 1,000,000 download mark, with my counter jumping to 1,000,018 downloads when it crossed that mark. It was only 19 days ago that it jumped past the half-million download mark.

Version 2.7 was released on 12/10/2008, with the official release being tagged at 22:48 (10:48pm). To calculate the time lapsed since release, I used the advance calculator at timeanddate.com. The result was that it took 28 days, 13 hours, 2 minutes for WordPress 2.7 to go from release to over a million downloads.

Giving my trusty calculator a bit of a workout, it averaged 24.33 downloads/minute since release, or roughly 1,460 downloads/hour during that time.

In the length of time it has taken me to write this post, the counter is now sitting at 1,003,215 at 12:51pm EST. That's roughly 53 downloads/minute since the million download milestone was reached. All I can say is wow - I'm glad I'm not paying their bandwidth bill!

If anyone captured the magical 1,000,000 mark exactly in a screenshot, please post it on your blog and link/trackback your post both here and on Lorelle's blog.

Until next time…

WordCamp Columbus

Kim — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 22:32:20 +0000

WordCamp is coming to Ohio!

While checking out the latest tweets from folks I follow on Twitter, I ran across one from Lorelle to @blantonious, asking for links to a blog for WordCamp Columbus. This is the first I had seen anything mentioned about it, so I was off in search of more information. And it didn't take long for me to find what I was looking for.

Columbus State Community College will be home to the first WordCamp Columbus, scheduled for May 16, 2009. Planning is still underway, and they ~~haven't opened registration just yet~~ (see update below). I'm very excited about the prospect of having a WordCamp so close to where I live.

Update - 12/30/2008: Registration opened this evening for WordCamp Columbus. Tickets are $25.99, and the first 50 registrants get in free by using the discount code "WordPress_Rocks". I'm already signed up!

If you are interested in helping make WordCamp Columbus fabulous, check out the Volunteer page on their website to see if there is something you can contribute.

Be sure to help spread the word by blogging about it and/or putting one of their badges on your blog. They already have three to choose from:

A big thanks to Alvin Borromeo and Jason Blanton for getting this rolling. I have already marked my calendar, and hope to be able to attend WordCamp Columbus.

Until next time...

WordPress 2.7: Half-million Downloads

Kim — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:55:47 +0000

WordPress 2.7 was officially tagged in the repository on 12/10/08 at 22:48:48, and released to the public moments later.

Changeset 10186:
Timestamp: 12/10/08 22:48:48 (1 week ago)
Author: ryan
Message: 2.7

Twenty hours later, the download counter at wordpress.org rolled over to the 100,000 mark. Ryan Boren was able to capture that magical moment and posted a screenshot of the counter on his blog.

Lorelle posted last evening that the download counter was approaching the half-million mark, and a "counter watch" started, to see who would capture the magical 500,000 screenshot.

At precisely 1:00am EST on 12/20/2008, WordPress 2.7 broke the 500,000 download mark, displaying 500,003 downloads. It took 9 days, 2 hours, 12 minutes to reach that point. That works out to roughly 2,294 downloads/hour since it was released - simply amazing!

The counter is now sitting at 507,538 as I write this post, at 8:55am EST, with roughly 837 downloads/hour happening since the milestone was reached.

If anyone captured the magical 500,000 mark exactly in a screenshot, please post it on your blog and link to your post here and on Lorelle's blog.

Until next time...

WordPress Plugin/Tutorial Update

Kim — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:49:21 +0000

I updated the WP Hide Dashboard plugin to work with WordPress 2.7. The latest version is available for download from the WordPress Extend section. If you have already installed it, you should be automatically notified of the new version on the Plugins page in your WordPress admin section.

I have also updated my tutorial "Allowing/Limiting User Access In WordPress" to reflect the proper method for implementing the code in WordPress 2.7.

Any questions should be left in the comments section of the respective posts.

Until next time...

Allowing/Limiting User Access In WordPress

Kim — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:00:32 +0000

12/19/2008: I have updated this tutorial to reflect how to implement this in WordPress 2.7. The code for 2.6.x is still available for download for anyone still using that version, but all references in the tutorial are now for version 2.7.

I recently completed a project where I needed to allow clients to login and access content specific to their account. The requirements were:

Provide a public login form for clients to use.
When logging in or logging out, ensure that they were directed to the website, not to the WordPress admin section.
Once logged in, display a control panel with a welcome message, the client's link(s), and a logout link.
Allow them to edit their profile, but restrict access to the rest of the admin section, including the dashboard.
When logged in, allow each client access to the regular website content, the support and billing information pages, and their individual account summary.

Clients were assigned to the Subscriber role, as the only capabilities they needed to have were to read or comment.

Research provided several possible solutions, and trial/error helped to narrow the field down to just one solution for each requirement that would work best for my project.

The sections below provide the detailed solutions, along with code examples, screenshots, and links to any plugins that were used.

Requirement #1: Public login form

This was fairly easy to accomplish. I took the basic WordPress login form code and added it to the sidebar:

<h4>('Client Login'); ?></h4>
 
<div>
<form name="loginform" id="loginform" action="" method="post">
<p>('Username') ?>:</label><br />
<input type="text" name="log" id="user_login" class="input" value="" size="23" tabindex="10" /></p>
<p><label>('Password') ?>:</label><br />
<input type="password" name="pwd" id="user_pass" class="input" size="23" tabindex="20" /></p>
('login_form'); ?>
<p><input type="submit" name="wp-submit" id="wp-submit" value="" tabindex="100" />
<input name="rememberme" id="rememberme" type="checkbox" checked="checked" value="forever" tabindex="90" /> <label for="rememberme">('Remember me'); ?></label><br />
<input type="hidden" name="testcookie" value="1" /></p>
</form>
</div>

This gave me the basic login form for the client to use:

Requirement #2: Login/logout redirection

Once logged in, I did not want the client to be taken to the WordPress admin section - I wanted them to stay on the same page that they were logging in from. I found a one-line solution to include in the login form that does just that:

<input type="hidden" name="redirect_to" value="" />

This one line of code will redirect the user back to the public page they logged in from. Now the login form code looks like this:

<h4>('Client Login'); ?></h4>
 
<div>
<form name="loginform" id="loginform" action="" method="post">
<p>('Username') ?>:</label><br />
<input type="text" name="log" id="user_login" class="input" value="" size="23" tabindex="10" /></p>
<p><label>('Password') ?>:</label><br />
<input type="password" name="pwd" id="user_pass" class="input" size="23" tabindex="20" /></p>
('login_form'); ?>
<p><input type="submit" name="wp-submit" id="wp-submit" value="" tabindex="100" />
<input name="rememberme" id="rememberme" type="checkbox" checked="checked" value="forever" tabindex="90" /> <label for="rememberme">('Remember me'); ?></label><br />
<input type="hidden" name="redirect_to" value="" />
<input type="hidden" name="testcookie" value="1" /></p>
</form>
</div>

Note: During my research, I found another WordPress plugin that allows you to set the exact page that each user will be redirected to upon login (Peter's Login Redirect) if you prefer they land on their account page instead. I did work with this plugin, and it is a good alternate solution for those requiring finer control. If you would use Peter's plugin, you will need to remove the redirect code (line 12) from the form.

Requirement #3: Control panel

Once logged in, the client is presented with their individual control panel:

The code for the control panel looks like this:

 global $user_identity, $user_ID; ?>
 if (is_user_logged_in()) { ?>

 
 _e('Control Panel'); ?>
 

 _e('Welcome back'); ?>  echo $user_identity ?>

 get_currentuserinfo(); if ('2' == $user_ID) { ?>
 bloginfo('url') ?>/clients/client1/" rel="nofollow" title=" _e('Your account summary'); ?>"> _e('Account summary'); ?>
 } ?>

 get_currentuserinfo(); if ('3' == $user_ID) { ?>
 bloginfo('url') ?>/clients/client2/" rel="nofollow" title=" _e('Your account summary'); ?>"> _e('Account summary'); ?>
 } ?>

 get_currentuserinfo(); if ('4' == $user_ID) { ?>
 bloginfo('url') ?>/clients/client3/" rel="nofollow" title=" _e('Your account summary'); ?>"> _e('Account summary'); ?>
 } ?>

 bloginfo('url') ?>/wp-admin/profile.php" rel="nofollow" title=" _e('Edit profile'); ?>"> _e('Edit profile'); ?>
 echo wp_logout_url(get_permalink()); ?>" rel="nofollow" title=" _e('Log out'); ?>"> _e('Log out'); ?>

Line 8 pulls in the personal welcome message. Lines 9-20 display the appropriate link for each client, based on their user ID, and lines 22 and 23 display the Edit profile and Log out links.

Requirement #4: Hide the dashboard

The Edit profile link in the Control Panel allows a client to update their profile; however, this also gives them access into the WordPress admin section via the Dashboard link. I found an existing plugin called IWG Hide Dashboard, but it relies on having the Role Manager plugin installed to work, and I did not intend to use that plugin.

I reviewed the existing plugin and figured out a way to make it work as a stand-alone plugin. Since all of the clients are assigned to the Subscriber role, I used current_user_can() to block their access to the Dashboard link and the Tools menu.

As a result, I worked up a new version, and released it to the WordPress community: WP Hide Dashboard. You can download it via the WordPress extend section.

Requirement #5: Restrict content access

Once I had the client login capability set up and the administrative access limitation in place, I had to find a simple way to restrict their access to only the content that was applicable to their account.

I researched different options using existing WordPress plugins, such as Role Manager, Role Scoper, WP Sentry, and others. All of them are good solutions for user management, but some were complicated to manage, and all of them were more than I needed for this project. I needed a simple, functional solution that just worked.

And I found one: a new plugin called wpNamedUsers. It allows you to specify which users can access a specific post or page, either while writing/editing a post/page, or bulk edit via the management page located under the Manage tab.

This allowed me to limit a client's access to only their specific account summary when logged in, and any other general client-only content, such as the Support and Billing pages. It is a simple, lightweight solution to controlling a client's access - no special capabilities or special roles, no complicated configuration - it just works!

Summary

To wrap things up, you will need the following to implement this:

Login form/control panel code:
• Allowing/Limiting Client Access Code (2.7) (added 12/19/2008)
• Allowing/Limiting Client Access Code (2.6.x) (added 11/04/2008)

Note: You will need to copy/paste all of this code into your sidebar, making sure to change the $user_ID number and the URL for each client.

Sample sidebar.php (default theme):
• Default Theme Sidebar (2.7) (added 12/19/2008)
• Default Theme Sidebar (2.6.x) (added 12/01/2008)
The following plugins:
• WP Hide Dashboard (to hide the Dashboard link and restrict WordPress admin section access)
• wpNamedUsers (to restrict a client to their individual account pages)
Optional plugin: Peter's Login Redirect (to redirect the client to a specific page on login rather than back to the same page)

If you have any questions or issues, please post them below. Thanks!

WordPress 2.6.3 Released

Kim — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 04:35:56 +0000

Hot off the presses from the WordPress Blog: Version 2.6.3 has been released - an update to fix a vulnerability in the Snoopy library that was announced today.

It is a low risk vulnerability for WordPress users, but the WordPress dev team wanted to release an update as quickly as possible to address the vulnerability.

You can download version 2.6.3, or, if you just want the security fix, you can download the two files listed in the WordPress Blog entry, and simply copy them to your 2.6.2 WordPress installation to apply the fix.

I chose the second option, and updated four WordPress installs in under two minutes. A piece of cake!

Until next time...

WP Admin Theme Fixer

Kim — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 13:46:18 +0000

WP Admin Theme Fixer allows you to customize the admin theme of your WordPress install. The included stylesheet has existing style changes made to font families/sizes, admin panel width, and table cell background color to improve the WordPress admin panel appearance, and also fixes some legacy style issues regarding fieldsets used in some older plugin admin pages.

The changes work with both the fresh and classic admin color schemes. You can edit the included wp-admin-theme-fixer.css file to add/edit/delete style elements, which will override existing WordPress admin styles.

Latest version: 1.0
Works with: WordPress Version 2.5 - Version 2.6.5
Last updated: October 19, 2008

Instructions:

Download WP Admin Theme Fixer and unzip it to a folder on your computer.
Upload the wp-admin-theme-fixer folder to the wp-content/plugins/ directory.
Activate the plugin through the Plugins section in WordPress.
That's it! Your custom admin style should appear upon activation.

Support:

Please post all questions, bug reports, and feature requests below. I will respond to them as quickly as possible.

Donate:

If you like this plugin and want to show your appreciation, link back to me or leave a comment below.

License:

This plugin is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Changelog:

Version 1.0: Initial release

WP Hide Dashboard

Kim — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 23:58:09 +0000

WP Hide Dashboard is a simple plugin that removes the Dashboard menu, the Tools menu, and the Help link on the Profile page, and prevents Dashboard access to users assigned to the Subscriber role. This is useful if you want to allow your subscribers to edit their own profiles, but don't want them wandering around the rest of your WordPress admin section.

Users belonging to any of the other WordPress roles will continue to see the Dashboard link and the Tools menu, and have access to the other sections of the WordPress admin that corresponds to their role's capabilities.

This plugin is based on the IWG Hide Dashboard plugin by Thomas Schneider, which requires having the Role Manager plugin activated in order for it to function.

This plugin relies only on core WordPress capabilities.

Latest version: 1.4
Works with: 2.5+
Compatible up to: 2.8.1-beta1
Last updated: June 26, 2009
Downloads: 11,343

Instructions:

Download WP Hide Dashboard from the WordPress Extend section, and unzip it to a folder on your computer.
Upload the wp-hide-dashboard folder to the wp-content/plugins/ directory.
Activate the plugin through the Plugins section in WordPress.
That's it! There is no configuration necessary.

Screenshots:

Version 2.6

Version 2.7/2.8

Frequently Asked Questions:

How do I change this to hide the dashboard and tools menu and help options from other roles besides Subscriber?

To hide these from other roles, you will need to edit the plugin in a plain text editor and make the following changes:

Subscriber → Contributor:
Change !current_user_can('edit_posts') to !current_user_can('upload_files')
Subscriber → Author:
Change !current_user_can('edit_posts') to !current_user_can('create_users')
Subscriber → Editor:
Change !current_user_can('edit_posts') to !current_user_can('manage_options')

There are 3 instances of this code in the plugin - make sure you change all of them.

Will you be creating an admin option page to allow specifying what role we want to hide these from?

I have this on the to-do list for the plugin, and am working on it for a future release. In the meantime, you will still need to edit the plugin manually to change the role.

Support:

Please post all questions, bug reports, and feature requests below. I will respond to them as quickly as possible.

Please do not email me asking for support unless I request that you do so. The answer to your issue may benefit someone else who has the same problem, so both your question and my response need to be in the comments section below.

Donate:

If you like this plugin and want to show your appreciation, rate the plugin on wordpress.org, link back to me from your blog, or leave a comment below.

License:

This plugin is released under the MIT License.

Changelog:

Version 1.4:
- Added code to remove Tools menu in 2.8.x (menu numbering changed in core).
- Added Frequently Asked Questions and proper Changelog sections to readme.txt file.
Version 1.3:
- Fixed error in WordPress version checking.
Version 1.2:
- Added removal of Help link on Profile page.
Version 1.1:
- Added WordPress version checking.
- Added code for defining path to /wp-content/plugins/ if outside the WordPress directory.
- Added removal of Tools menu and collapsible arrow from the menu area in 2.7.
Version 1.0:
- Initial release.

New Direction

Kim — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:19:33 +0000

In response to clients' requests for stable hosting, I have set up a hosting division as part of KP Design. I am not offering hosting to the general public; this service will only be available to my clients.

My hope is to eliminate server and management issues due to clients being spread over several other webhosts/servers by bringing them all under one "roof".

More information about the new hosting division can be found at http://hosting.kpdesign.net/.

Until next time...

WordPress 2.6, Beta 1 Available

Kim — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:29:52 +0000

Ryan Boren announced on his blog yesterday that WordPress 2.6, Beta 1 is now available for download and testing. The features list is nice, and a lot of the things that were missing in the 2.5 release have been included in version 2.6. He also stated that they are aiming for a mid-July release for 2.6 - a full month ahead of the August 2008 scheduled release.

The new post revisioning feature is going to be a life-saver, giving you the ability to retrieve content that had been previously deleted. Multi-author blogs will also benefit greatly from this, allowing them to track who changed what and when. Version control in WordPress - long awaited, and finally here in 2.6!

Chris Johnston has a demo of WordPress 2.6 set up so you can take a tour for yourself. You can login here (username: admin, password: demo).

I took a quick spin around the admin panel, and I like the changes that have been made to the plugins page. They have separated the currently active plugins from the inactive ones, and the ability to delete, activate, and deactivate plugins in bulk is a nice addition as well.

Looks like I am going to be busy in mid-July, updating WordPress installs!

Until next time...

FluxBB: New Kid On The Block

Kim — Sat, 10 May 2008 01:40:43 +0000

In an announcement made this afternoon on both the PunBB forum and on their own website, the PunBB development team has forked the forum software project and created the latest addition to the scene - FluxBB.

Significant changes have taken place in the PunBB organization since the announcement last October that the rights for the project had been sold to another company that wanted to support the project financially.

Apparently the latest change (moving from the punbb.org domain to a subdomain on the company's website) was not received well by the dev team and the community. Responses to that announcement were less than favorable from long-time supporters of the project.

Here is full text of their announcement:

Hello all,

Some of you may have been wondering about the future of PunBB and the current development team following Rickard's announcement that he will not be actively involved with PunBB, at least for the time being. To cut to the chase, Neal (Smartys), Paul, Kristoffer (Jansson) and I have, with regret, decided that we are unable to continue our involvement with the development of PunBB.

We all became involved with PunBB largely because we shared Rickard's vision of the project. We were all happy to defer to his views on the future development of PunBB, especially since the project was his "baby," so to speak. Now that circumstances have changed with the inevitable shift of power within the project, we all feel that we need a degree of control over future development which is no longer possible. We all share a desire to develop software for the benefit of the community and ourselves, without commercial concerns influencing the final product. This is not a condemnation of PunBB's current owners; we simply feel that this change is necessary so that we as developers can maintain full control over the development process.

Despite this change, we are not abandoning the PunBB community. As we promised in the past, we have started our own fork of PunBB called FluxBB. We are continuing to develop the 1.3 branch of PunBB (re-branded as FluxBB) and have released a new beta version of it along with some extensions. We will also support and continue to provide security updates for the 1.2 branch of PunBB. As a part of that promise, we have released FluxBB 1.2.18, a stability update for 1.2 which fixes several known issues with 1.2.17. We hope that everyone can check out our site and that those who wish to do so will register and become a part of our new community.

If you are a current PunBB user, take a look at FluxBB - same great software, new name - and make the switch today. I know I'm going to.

Until next time...

A Fresh Start

Kim — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:49:15 +0000

I made the decision to migrate this website over to another hosting account a few weeks ago, and wanted to find a better way to manage the site. I had worked with WordPress recently on a project for a friend, doing the initial install and upgrading it twice.

On a side note, I had "test-driven" WordPress a few times over the years, but it never really quite did what I needed at the time. However, this time around, I was impressed with what WordPress has to offer, so I decided to use it to rebuild the site on the new server. This post details all that went on to make it happen.

The old site was static, built by hand using numerous php includes. With all of WordPress' capabilities, I now have a solid publishing platform, allowing me to manage the site much more efficiently.

I created the site using the Pages feature heavily, with the posts being assigned to a page called Blog. A special permalinks structure has made it possible to almost match the URLs on the old site. A variety of plugins have been installed and fired up that give me most of the same functionality and control that I had when I was hand-coding the old version.

Here's the lineup that provides the front-end functionality for the website:

Access Keys 1.0 by Aaron Harun: I am a supporter of accessibility, and wanted to maintain the system of access keys that I had already established on the original version. This plugin has allowed me to assign access keys to each of the primary site pages. A list of those access keys can be found on the Accessibility page.
Core Sidebars 1.0.0 by Daniel: The old site had different content in each of the right sidebars. I spent hours scouring the WordPress Codex, trying to understand the code used in sidebars in order to have each one be different and work up the code to accomplish that -no easy task with 17 different sidebars. Daniel's plugin made the job very easy. Within about 20 minutes of installing this, all of my sidebars looked identical to the old version.
Dagon Design Form Mailer 5.4 by Aleister, Dagon Design: I had used this script to power the Contact and RFQ forms on the old site. It was easy to work with then, so it was a given that I'd be using the plugin version to power the WordPress versions of the forms.
Page Link Manager 0.3 by Garrett Murphey: I read up on how to accomplish the exclusion of certain pages using the wp_list_pages() function, and could have done it that way; however, Garrett's plugin makes it "easy as pie" to do the same thing. No messing with the template files - just a few checkmarks in the right places, and it "just works."
SEO Title Tag 2.1.3 by Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts: Once again, I spent hours scouring the WordPress Codex, trying to find a way to have control over the title of each page. Then I discovered Stephan's plugin, and about 30 minutes later, I had everything the way I wanted it to be. Lazy? Probably, but I did learn a lot while doing the research that I will be able to apply to other projects.
Page Hover Titles 0.1 by Mark Jaquith: One of the things that WordPress is lacking is the ability to change the content of the link title attribute of the site navigation links. I needed to be able to include the access key information as well as expand some of the titles that display in the link tooltips. I did a thorough search of the entire WordPress site (plugins, Codex and forums) with no solution found. I then took the search to Google, where I found Mark's plugin. It was supposed to allow me to use custom fields to set the hover_title value for each of the links, but it didn't work. I sent an email to the author in the hopes that he can help me get it running on WP 2.5.1. (Hi Mark, hope you got my email!) Update: In a trackback to Mark's blog, I found a link to a discussion over at theblogexperiment.com, within a post from Sarah G, looking for the same functionality. She was unable to get Mark's plugin to work either, so she wrote one of her own (Custom Title Attributes 1.3 by Sarah G). I've downloaded and installed it, and it works like a charm, as you can see by hovering over the links in the menu bar. Thanks Sarah!
WP 2.5 Gallery Lightbox 1.3 by Sam Burdge: I had incorporated the Lightbox script on the inactive website pages to present screenshots of the site layouts, since they were no longer available online. Sam's implementation of the Lightbox script allowed me to continue that functionality with relative ease.

A new addition to the site is the blog you are currently reading. I wanted someplace where I could write from time to time. There are a few plugins that I am using to add some nice features for the commenters:

Comment Relish 1.0 by Justin Shattuck: An email is automatically sent upon comment approval, which provides me with a way to thank first-time commenters on this blog for taking the time to submit their thoughts and opinions, and encourage them to come back.
Filosofo Comments Preview 1.0.5 by Austin Matzko: Having taken the time to write out a comment, I wanted my viewers to have a way to preview their remarks before submitting them - this plugin does just that, plus it helps slow down any spammers that might wander in here by forcing a preview before a comment can be submitted.
Subscribe To Comments 2.1.2 by Mark Jaquith: Great for anyone who doesn't use a feed reader, as they can be notified by email whenever a new comment is submitted to a post they have subscribed to.

Rounding out the list, I also have several great plugins that are helping out behind the scenes:

Admin Big Width 1.0 by Xorax: Just because I like the admin panel to stretch across the whole page rather than a fixed-width on the left.
Akismet 2.1.4 by Matt Mullenweg: I've been using Akismet on my photoblog to cut down on spam, so it was a natural that I use it here as well.
Article Templates 1.04.0 by Binny V A: This allows me to set up templates that are used routinely for creating similar pages or posts - a real time-saver.
Batch Categories 1.4 by Rob Miller: This allows me to easily reorganize the post categories, rather than having to go through them one at a time to change the categories. This one falls in the "planning for the future" category.
Better Comments Manager 1.5.1 by Keith Dsouza: This plugin expands my ability to approve, filter and respond to comments from within the admin panel.
FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3.1 by Steve Smith & Feedburner: I wanted a way to consolidate all of my feeds into one so that I could track my subscribers via Feedburner. FeedSmith does just that.
WordPress.com Stats 1.2.1 by Andy Skelton: This plugin replaced the stats program that I was using with the old version.

After getting the site up and functioning the way I wanted, that only left creating a WordPress theme that incorporated my old site design. Starting with my original template, I added the necessary WordPress code in the right places to display the content the way I wanted it to be, then split it up into the different template files that WordPress requires. I looked at a lot of templates, trying to learn as much as I could about how a template works before beginning the task, and that research paid off handsomely. I was able to recreate my design with a minimum of hassle.

I know this has been a long read, but if you've gotten to this point, I want to let you know how much I appreciate your time. If this helps another WordPress user to get started or to accomplish something similar, then the time it took to write this has been worthwhile.

I would also like to give a huge thanks to the WordPress development team, plugin and theme developers, and the community for their hard work, dedication, and the excellent documentation which allowed this WordPress newbie to dive right in and learn what was needed to bring this project to fruition. Thanks!

Until next time...

Transition

Kim — Sun, 04 May 2008 18:46:34 +0000

I am still working on getting the site up and running using WordPress. I'm now down to the final stages, and all that is left is to complete the styling of the blog entries and comments.

I've really learned a lot in the past couple of weeks working on this project that I can apply to client jobs. I already have two clients in mind to convert their existing sites from their current CMS to WordPress.

Hopefully I will complete the work on the stylesheet so that I can take this version of the site live yet today.

UPDATE: It's 10:30pm, and I finished up a couple of hours ago - the site conversion is now complete. I'll be doing a more detailed write-up about how I set everything up, probably some time tomorrow.