Dashboard Options
Current Version: 1.4.3
Good news, the 1.4 release should support WordPress 2.0. There are two “index.php” files included in the archive. If you have not customized your administrative index.php file, then you can just rename and drop in the appropriate replacement file. The instructions below have been updated to reflect the edits that are required to modify the stock wp-admin/index.php file if you’d prefer or if you have a customized version already.
Dashbord Options (download) provides some new features for the Dashboard admin page of WordPress. See this comment for information on the bug fix for 1.3.
For users experiencing the “Peek-a-Boo” problem (specific to Internet Explorer 6, I believe), check out this comment by Erich Brown for a potential solution to your problem. It’s an issue with IE 6 and a layout bug, not specifically an issue with Dashboard Options.
Features:
- Toggle the WordPress Development RSS feed on or off
- Toggle the WordPress Other News RSS feed on or off
- Toggle the Technorati RSS feed on or off
- Optionally display custom message text in the Dashboard
- Optionally treat custom message text as PHP, allowing extreme customization of the Dashboard content (if you know PHP)
- Optionally display additional, custom RSS feeds
Note to version 1.1 users: see steps 4b and 4e
I’ve found that, while I like the overview that the Dashboard provides, I don’t really want to take the often-times extremely long load penalty due to the default RSS feeds that are loaded.
Installation
Unfortunately, there is no way for me to provide a “drop install” solution. The following is the simplest set of installation instructions that I can provide at this time.
Step 1
Drop the dashboardopts.php file into your plugins folder (wp-content/plugins/).
Thanks go to Charlie for pointing out and inspiring a tweak to the code that should allow users to put the plugin inside a sub-directory within their wp-content/plugins directory.
Step 2
Go to your blog Admin page and go to the Plugins page. Activate the Dashboard Options plugin.
Step 3
Modify or replace your wp-admin/index.php file to take advantage of the Dashboard Options plugin. If you have not made modifications to the default wp-admin/index.php page, you can replace it with the included index.php file (I suggest making a backup of your wp-admin/index.php file first).
Step 4
Step 4 (and its sub-steps) are only necessary if you have choosen to edit your wp-admin/index.php file instead of replacing it.
Open wp-admin/index.php in your favorite text editor.
Step 4a: Edit 1
Find the line:
$rss = @fetch_rss('http://feeds.technorati.com/cosmos/rss/?url='. trailingslashit(get_option('home') .'&partner=wordpress');
and replace it with:
if( get_option('show_technorati_feed') == 1 )
{
$rss = @fetch_rss('http://feeds.technorati.com/cosmos/rss/?url='. trailingslashit(get_option('home')) .'&partner=wordpress');
}
else{ $rss = ''; }
Step 4b: Edit 2
Now find the line:
Pre WordPress 2.0
<?php _e(’Below is the latest news from the official WordPress development blog, click on a title to read the full entry.’); ?>
WordPress 2.0
<?php _e(”Below is the latest news from the official WordPress development blog, click on a title to read the full entry. If you need help with WordPress please see our <a href=’http://codex.wordpress.org/’>great documentation</a> or if that doesn’t help visit the <a href=’http://wordpress.org/support/’>support forums</a>.”); ?>
and replace it with:
<?php
if(get_option('dashboard_message') != '' && get_option('dashboard_show_message') == 1)
{
_e(cjb_dashboard_getmessage());
}
?>
Pre WordPress 2.0
<?php
if(get_option(’show_dev_feed’) == 1)
{
_e(’Below is the latest news from the official WordPress development blog, click on a title to read the full entry.’);
}
?>
WordPress 2.0
<?php
if(get_option(’show_dev_feed’) == 1)
{
_e(”Below is the latest news from the official WordPress development blog, click on a title to read the full entry. If you need help with WordPress please see our great documentation or if that doesn’t help visit the <a href=’http://wordpress.org/support/’>support forums.”);
}
?>
Step 4c: Edit 3
Find the line:
$rss = @fetch_rss('http://wordpress.org/development/feed/');
and replace it with:
if( get_option('show_dev_feed') == 1 )
{
$rss = @fetch_rss('http://wordpress.org/development/feed/');
}
else{ $rss = ''; }
Step 4d: Edit 4
Now find the line:
$rss = @fetch_rss('http://planet.wordpress.org/feed/');
and replace it with:
if( get_option('show_other_feed') == 1 )
{
$rss = @fetch_rss('http://planet.wordpress.org/feed/');
}
else{ $rss = ''; }
Step 4e: Edit 5
Find the following lines:
<div style="clear: both">
<br clear="all" />
and replace them with:
<?php cjb_dashboard_showcustomcontent(); ?>
<div style="clear: both">
<br clear="all" />
Step 5: Modify Your Settings
Now, go into the Admin section of your blog and click the “Options” menu item. There should be a new item called “Dashboard Options” and all the settings can be modified from there.
Disabling a feed will cause the Dashboard to not load the rss feed, leaving the $rss variable empty. The rest of the code for the Dashboard already ‘hides’ the related feed areas if the $rss variable is empty.
Tips
The following should hopefully help new and current users with the options past enabling or disabling the default RSS feeds.
User Level
The “user level” option allows you to set the minimum user level that can make modifications to the custom message. I haven’t done a lot of testing, but for instance, users with a user level of 7 have access to the Options tab, and therefore to the Dashboard Options. For settings below those that have access to the Options tab, the user level doesn’t do anything. That could change for future versions of the plugin, so I suggest setting it to a level that you find appropriate (remember, 10 is the admin).
Custom Message
The Custom Message field can be used in two ways, the first is to just fill the field with whatever information you’d like to display and the second is to put PHP code into the field to do basically whatever you want.
To use it as PHP, select the two checkboxes and put valid PHP code into the field. DO NOT put the code inside . Just use plain PHP in the field.
Custom RSS Feeds
This field lets you display your own custom RSS Feeds in the Dashboard. They will appear below any of the default WordPress feeds. There is a special format used so that you can specify a lot of optional information.
RSS Feed URL`Title`Link`stylesheet class`style`id`max items
The RSS Feed URL is the URL to the feed, obviously, and is required. The remaining items are ALL optional. However, if you do not wish to use one of the middle fields, you must leave include it as a blank. Please note that if you do not include a Title, then the Link is also ignored.
The options page includes an example that will re-create the WordPress Other News feed.
Future Enhancements
I would love to make this a simple installation, but I don’t know of any way to do so at this time. I have seriously considered writing a function in the plugin that would go in and modify the wp-admin/index.php file with the edits as described above. It could be made fairly safely, but would require write permissions for the web server on the wp-admin/index.php file to work. That seems like a not-so-great idea to me.
Another option is to re-create the index.php file with function calls and then have users ALL of their index.php file. That is also not-so-great, in my opinion, because it would make it more difficult for users to modify their index.php file for other purposes.
There are functions to add sub-menus to the Dashboard page, but that does not provide the same set of useful features at all.
For now, a simple install is my number-one wish, but also the least likely to happen any time soon. My hope is that I can keep the installation procedure down to nothing more complex than what it is now. In fact, if I’ve done this correctly, then the cjb_dashboard_showcustomcontent() call should take care of further additions.
Bugs and Questions
Please feel free to contact me with questions if isn’t clear or something is not working as it should.
Version History
- Version 1.4.3 Fixed a bug where the number of feed items for custom RSS feeds was ignored.
- Version 1.4.2 Compatibility with WP 2.0.3 and nonces
- Version 1.4 Compatibility with WordPress 2.0
- Version 1.3.3 Fixed a mis-use of the _e() function (replaced with echo). Thanks goes to Kimmo and K
- Previous Versions Everything up to the point when I started putting this info here.
February 19th, 2005 at 10:58 PM
I like this plugin! I would like it if you made a change to allow me to specify the text on the Dashboard. I would like to use the dashboard to give instructions or notices to blog authors. I could create a tutorial for posting or show my own rss feeds. If you make any of these changes please let me know!
Thanks Alot.
February 20th, 2005 at 4:56 PM
Hey Pete, I’ll see what I can do about that. It shouldn’t be too much work, though it will probably require another edit to wp-admin/index.php.
February 22nd, 2005 at 8:06 AM
Hey, I like your plugin but I agree with Pete about customizing the message on the dashboard.
February 22nd, 2005 at 3:59 PM
Actually i?ɬ?unn, version 1.1 lets you put a custom message on the Dashboard and a version "in testing" lets you treat the "message" as PHP. That makes it powerful, but not easy because you have to know PHP to use it. Still, that lets you do a lot of cool stuff.
I’ve got some ideas for drastically altering wp-admin/index.php, making my plugin installation easier and the plugin more powerful. Time and interest will tell.
February 25th, 2005 at 5:48 PM
Good work.. I was getting a bit annoyed at the lag
Josh
February 25th, 2005 at 11:51 PM
Can you give an example of the cool stuff it will allow a person to do? I’m seriously interested in this. I like the plugin so far. It has TONS of potential.
February 26th, 2005 at 1:00 PM
way to go! nice work, chris. Its real handy.
February 28th, 2005 at 8:56 PM
Thanks for that, my isp require me to request each site that’s coming in be checked and added to the firewall, so I can’t use external feeds without permission. I didn’t think there was any need for me to do that as only I was seeing the page, and I can get the feeds alsewhere.
Great work, hope you carry on and extend the plugin, a drop in version would be much appreciated by many I’m sure.
March 2nd, 2005 at 3:51 PM
Thanks for making this plugin Chris. What should I see on the dashboard if I deactivate all three of the feeds? I have deactivasted all feeds, but I only see the standard menu bar and the “Latest Activity” box.
Also when I set “User Level” to 10 for the Custom Message options, the input box for the custom message and the user level drop down are no longer displayed. I “fixed” this by changing the following line of code to include a comparison for level 10. I guess another option is changing the “>” to “>=”.
$dashboard_userlevel_guard) || ($user_level == 10))
{
?>
March 2nd, 2005 at 11:08 PM
Lilyan, good catch. I’ve fixed my dev version and when I post the next version (which lets the plugin treat the “custom message” as PHP), that fix will be in.
The upcoming release doesn’t make installation easier, but it will open up a LOT of doors for those who know PHP.
Following versions will hopefully make installation easier. Unfortunately, I don’t believe I will ever be able to release a plugin that doesn’t require modifying the wp-admin/index.php file to some extent unless some changes are made to the WordPress back end.
March 3rd, 2005 at 6:41 PM
I love this! Great plugin. I would like to add me own rss feeds. Is there a way to do this yet?
March 3rd, 2005 at 7:49 PM
For me, the dahsboardopts preference pane didn’t work properly. I got a 404 error when I clicked on the “Dashboard Options” preference pane; the URL it was trying to access hte preferences from was “wp-admin/dashboardopts.php”, which obviously didn’t exist, as dashboardopts.php is in the plugins folder.
I fixed this by altering the add_options_page call in “dashboardopts.php” to read:
add_options_page(’dashboardopts.php’, ‘Dashboard Options’, 5, ‘../wp-content/plugins/dashboardopts.php’);
March 4th, 2005 at 8:38 AM
This is sweet. Kudos.
March 4th, 2005 at 9:34 AM
Aha, I have found the error in my ways: First, I mistyped the line that made the plugin work, hiding the error (the path that made it work for me should have read ‘../wp-content/plugins/dashboard/dashboardopts.php’). In fact the trouble was that I installed the plugin in a subdirectory “dashboard” instead of just in the plugins directory.
Thanks Chris for getting in touch with me about this.
March 4th, 2005 at 8:08 PM
Version 1.3 is out and allows you to add custom RSS feeds to your Dashboard and use the "custom message" area for PHP code (which opens up a lot of possibilities for those of you who know PHP).
The installation instructions have been appropriately updated. Users of version 1.1 need to look at step 4b and step 4e.
Thanks go to Charlie for pointing out and inspiring a tweak to the code that should allow users to put the plugin inside a sub-directory within their wp-content/plugins directory.
March 4th, 2005 at 10:34 PM
Thanks for the plugin!!!
March 5th, 2005 at 7:19 AM
Great Plugin, installed!
March 5th, 2005 at 5:28 PM
I have installed it and when I have tried to make a change to the custommessage or add an RSS feed, it’s not saving the changes, when it says “Changes Saved.” I have the file writable at 666… any ideas?
March 5th, 2005 at 5:40 PM
I sent you an e-mail Todd. I can’t think of anything that would cause it to fail, but we’ll try to work it out and see what’s going on. The plugin uses the standard WordPress functions to save the options to the database, so I’m at a loss right now…
March 6th, 2005 at 3:16 AM
todd, i’m having the same problem — it’s weird, because when i *first* installed the plugin, i was able to change my custom message in the admin panel, but it didn’t show up on the dashboard page. now, after logging out and back in again, i can no longer make any changes to the text OR check the ’show custom message’ box. it says the changes are being saved, but they are not… i can still turn RSS feeds on or off, however, and the changes are saved properly. (?) if you find the source of your problem, please let me know.
~ jason
March 6th, 2005 at 3:22 AM
just a thought… but somehow i’ve a weird hunch that the problem came about when i set the ‘required user level’ to 10?
March 6th, 2005 at 6:24 AM
Follow-up: Not sure what the problem was, but I deleted and re-created my database (no sweat because I didn’t yet have any actual content!), and with the fresh install, the problem has fixed itself. Thanks for a great product, Chris! This is excellent! Now I can dress up my intro page real purdy…
March 6th, 2005 at 9:01 AM
Thanks for all the feedback Jason, hopefully between you and Todd I’ll be able to figure out what’s going wrong.
Thanks for the compliments
March 6th, 2005 at 2:04 PM
Bug found and squashed! Thanks to Todd and jason for their assistance in tracking it down. This is related to the earlier fix that was found/made by Lilyan.
For those who are already running the plugin, you can either re-download the package and replace the dashboardopts.php file or make the following edit:
Find the line:
'show_technorati_feed'<?php if($user_level > $dashboard_userlevel_guard )and replace it with:
'show_technorati_feed'<?php if($user_level >= $dashboard_userlevel_guard )For those looking for the difference, the first line has
$user_level > $dashboard_userlevel_guardand the second has$user_level >= $dashboard_userlevel_guardMarch 7th, 2005 at 12:43 AM
Thanks for all the help, everything is working and I love the plugin, great job!
March 7th, 2005 at 8:38 PM
This just works. It was the first plug-in I installed in my new WordPress blog and it just works. Thank you.
March 7th, 2005 at 10:20 PM
Glad to hear that it went smoothly for you Jessamyn. If you (and this goes for anyone) come up with some feature that you think is worth adding, please drop me an e-mail or a comment. I’d love to make it as useful as possible to as many people as possible
March 9th, 2005 at 7:22 AM
This plugin sounds great. Will download and try it out.
I don’t know if the plugin allows what I am thinking (it doesn’t sound like it), but what I was wanting was:
a) To be able to disable the dashboard completely, based on user level - e.g. all users under level 5 will not see the dashboard
b) To choose whether or not the dashboard is the first admin page that a user sees when logging in. I think it’d be useful to send the user straight to the Write Post section, so they can write their thoughts immediately, and then choose to view the dashboard if they want to catch up with the latest developments.
Good work.
March 9th, 2005 at 6:58 PM
Prem, those are certainly “doable” features (I think). Work’s been a real killer and it’s only Wednesday, but I’ll see about adding those specific features.
They should be doable with the plugin by using the custom text area as PHP code, but that would require that you know PHP and would certainly not be terribly elegant. So if you absolutely can’t wait for those to be available, then you could try hacking it yourself; either via the custom message area or straight in the plugin itself.
March 17th, 2005 at 7:01 PM
Weird side effect though… every few days the “WordPress Other News Feed” comes back and I have to go back in and uncheck the box on the dashboard options page [I’m using 1.5] any idea why?
March 17th, 2005 at 10:13 PM
I like it very much, thanks. One thing I want to know is if it is possible to control the number of entries that are displayed by each one of the feeds?
I don’t want to see all these technorati stuff but just 5 would be great, the same goes to the other feeds or any other that anyone use.
March 18th, 2005 at 12:28 AM
I just found out that my Dashboard Options here was outdated and when I move to 1.3.1 it was loading the panel incorrectly: th bottom of the page was not loading (wordpress symbol, wp version and forum link, time loading and get firefox ad).
modifying step by step and trying it made me see that the problem occour at step 4e where you say to add this:
I do not use this function so my box at dashboard options for custom feeds are empty. when I correctly fill it the function works great and the page loads correctly. For now I have removed it from my index.php code.
As I do not know php i can’t help anymore.
And for my previous post a plus: with all this messing and carefully reading of the codes I find out this from line 157 to 160:
items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, 20);foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
?>
The number ‘20′ here is the amount of items displayed for the feed. This goes on for any feed. So my suggestion now is to better control this amount by adding mode one option to the feed listing and setting a default like 5. Also let it to be configurable the amount of the technorati, dev and other blogs.
Also it will be good to disable custom feeds. I do not need the presence of any feed at my panel and this is what motivated me the most to find a plugin like dashboard options and it’s well-done-work at version 1.1 and 1.3.1 makes me feel it can be improved even more.
March 18th, 2005 at 7:50 AM
Thanks for your comments and suggestions (and a bug find!) Tiago.
Version 1.3.2 fixes the custom RSS feed bug that Tiago ran in to (oops!). 1.3.2 is just a drop-in replacement for 1.3.x. Essentially it’s a one-line fix, but it’s an important line
Your suggestion for providing settings for the number of RSS items to load is a good one that will probably make it in to 1.4 (assuming 1.4 gets written).
March 25th, 2005 at 8:34 PM
When I shut off all feeds and put up a custom message…if I click site admin from the home page of my site, the custom text doesn’t show up until I highlight another link on the dashboard or on the top menu.
-Pat
March 26th, 2005 at 1:02 AM
Re: My last post, I think it is the peekaboo bug - but, if so, how would I fix that? Doesn’t this effect other folks too?
Thx
March 26th, 2005 at 12:45 PM
pinfante, do you have any other plugins running? I’ve not had this occur in testing, so I’ll need your assistance in tracking it down
April 20th, 2005 at 5:16 AM
On my Windows development box, which I use as a staging server, I get an HTTP 404 error when attempting to view the options page.
The requested URL /wordpress/wp-admin/C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\htdocs\wordpress\wp-content\plugins\dashboardopts.php was not found on this server.
Apparently the __FILE__ technique doesn’t always work. I’ll modify it to point to the file more specifically, but you might want to fix that at some point. Or tell me what I was doing wrong.
Thanks,
Wil
April 20th, 2005 at 7:36 AM
Hi Wil, I tried sending you an e-mail but it bounced. Did you obfuscate your e-mail address in some way?
Here’s the relevant bit:
April 24th, 2005 at 4:49 PM
Just FYI, I had problems manually editing my wp-admin/index.php file by hand, because your code statements above are being processed by WordPress…this makes all the single quote marks into “smart” single quotes, which screws up cut-and-paste into PHP code. You may want to fix that using the CODE tag. Thanks for the plugin!!
April 24th, 2005 at 9:35 PM
Thanks for the comment Neil, I hadn’t noticed that the CSS (or some browsers’ interpretation of that CSS, perhaps) were mangling the single quotes like that.
I’ll have to put that on my to-do list
April 28th, 2005 at 6:11 PM
Hi, thanks for a great plugin! I have to suggest a bug, however, I don’t know if it is wordpress or this plugin or magpierss, but just suddenly when accessing the dashboard the wp-options table broke, thus making the whole blog break. Via PHPMyAdmin:: SQL-query: SHOW KEYS FROM `wp_options`; MySQL said: #1016 - Can’t open file: ‘wp_options.MYD’. (errno: 145).. Luckily “Repair table” helped, and the output is here: Table Op Msg_type Msg_text
database.wp_options repair info Wrong bytesec: 49-34-59 at 263996; Skipped
databale.wp_options repair info Found block that points outside data file at
23232…
database.wp_options repair warning Number of rows changed from 112 to 110
database.wp_options repair status OK
The two rows that were removed from wp-options table contained custom feeds for this plugin. They were both feeds from technorati, maybe there happened to be some invalid content in them or something… Sadly I couldn’t get the content of those rows for inspection as they were broke, but I could identify the broken and thus now missing rows to this plugin by comparing with a sql-backup from a few days ago. But now everything is ok again, and I disabled those feeds from the dashboard just to make sure.
And now to think of it, I have installed an updated MagpieRSS (rss-functions.php) that came with FeedWordPress here. ..So this might just be another strange incident that just happens sometimes as it is a teamplay of code from many different sources. But could there be a possible bug lurking in dashboard option plugin’s custom feeds, or is this a more general wordpress feed bug or something?
May 5th, 2005 at 8:03 AM
Hey Man this is great!!! I’m new to wordpress and as soon as installed it and visited the admin section I saw that dashboard and thought to myself “that has got to go” and, believe it or not, later I was hoping I could replace the feeds with other more interesting things.
One option/feature I would like to see is a way to specify dashboard messages and feeds per user or per user level. THAT WOULD BE GREAT!!! my site is for my wife and I and I would like to see some tech feeds when I login but I know she doesn’t want anything like that. So that feature would be great.
May 5th, 2005 at 8:49 AM
Glad you like it Mike
Adding user-level features is a thought that I’ve toyed with. I think I have an idea for making it happen, but of all the features to add, per-user stuff is the most cumbersome (IMO). Still, it’s a possibility that I’m investigating.
May 6th, 2005 at 7:15 PM
This plugin is fantastic!
Would you allow me to include it as part of a multiuser bloghosting?
May 9th, 2005 at 6:12 PM
Ref comments 39 and 40…it’s not a browser-based CSS thing, it’s an HTML thing. This is almost definitely due to WP doing some “clean up” on the formatting…if you look at the HTML, you’ll see that the numeric character reference (NCR) codes in use are #8216 and #8217, which correspond to left and right single quotes as shown here:
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/quotes-in-html.html
Not trying to be a pain in the butt at all–heck, I just learned this myself!–but didn’t want you chasing through too many CSS things to never find anything.
Looks like you’re using blockquotes to show the code; I suggest using a code tags inside the blockquote to format the links, and this likely won’t be a problem anymore!
Good luck…Neil
May 9th, 2005 at 6:25 PM
Oh, and one more item…in Edit #1, your third line has an extra “);” at the end…delete it, and all will be well.
BTW, after adjusting for this and the quotes-thing, your plug-in works just great with WP1.5.1, which was just released today. (I’m downloader #800 or so ). I manually entered wp-admin/index.php, instead of using the one you provided. If you want me to e-mail it, send an e-mail to the address posted with this comment and I’ll send it to you.
Thanks…Neil
May 9th, 2005 at 8:06 PM
Pain? Neil, you’re providing some valuable feedback and ways to improve the plugin, I don’t consider that a pain. Changed the HTML above to use <code> tags and fixed that extra ) so all should be good. I’ll have to check out 1.5.1 and see what fun changes are there. Probably nothing that requires any modifications to the plugin, but it’ll be good to find out.
Now if you can just come up with a way to do a drag and drop install…
At one point I considered writing some PHP to do some merging, but that’s a can of worms best left locked in a basement somewhere.
May 16th, 2005 at 9:35 AM
I have been getting the following error:
Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/virtual/site4/fst/var/www/html/beta/wp-content/plugins/dashboardopts.php(182) : eval()'d code on line 1
Any ideas?
May 16th, 2005 at 9:40 AM
Oops, figured out the previous error.
If you select to evaluate the custom message as PHP but do not have PHP in the custom message, you will get that message.
Interetsing.
May 16th, 2005 at 6:46 PM
Hi David,
Yeah, there’s not really much that I can think to do about that. I mean, besides coming up with a way to validate the PHP before saving the field. And that doesn’t sound like much fun to figure out, and probably not worth it anyway
If you tell it to evaluate it as PHP, the whole box is treated as PHP. It is not embedded, it’s passed straight to the PHP processor. Maybe I should put Use with Caution next to the checkbox
May 26th, 2005 at 2:21 PM
AMAZING PLUGIN! I’m so glad to be rid of all that stuff in the dashboard.
But, I must point out a typo in your installation instructions.
On your Step 4a: Edit 1: Your replacement line that begins with “$rss = @fetch_rss…”, at the end of that line there is an extra “);” in your instructions.
Thanks so much for making this plugin!
May 26th, 2005 at 2:41 PM
Thanks Melbell, for both the compliment and the catch on the instructions!
May 26th, 2005 at 3:13 PM
Hehe, no problem. I am probably the first person that installed the long way, by finding and replacing all that text…but I couldn’t for the life of me remember if I had edited my index.php file. So I just couldn’t take the chance
May 26th, 2005 at 3:23 PM
I know for a fact that you aren’t the only person who’s done it the long way
June 1st, 2005 at 1:59 PM
Hi. I love this plugin and it works great for me with one exception. I’ve set it up to display a custom message and I can see it in all browsers I’ve tried except for IE 6. The text doesn’t display. If I highlight it, though, you can see that the text is there. I tried setting the font color to black on a white background to make it display, but it still doesn’t show up. Any ideas? Thanks for your help.
June 1st, 2005 at 2:25 PM
Okay. I just noticed that the text doesn’t display when you load the page, but if you minimize the window and then open it again, it looks fine. What could be causing this?
June 1st, 2005 at 5:39 PM
Well, I did a search and found out its the peekaboo bug. I set a fixed width for the box that the dashboard message is in, and it works fine now. Gotta love Internet Explorer.
June 2nd, 2005 at 7:27 AM
Hi Aja,
I’m glad you found a solution ’cause I was feeling a bit stumped
And yeah, isn’t IE just… great… *cough* I have one template (not for this site) that, if the size of the post area is too small (such as if it is a page with one short post), then IE makes the width of the content area 100%. I messed around with it for awhile, but in the end decided it just wasn’t worth trying to fix since it was obviously a bug in IE.
June 11th, 2005 at 10:26 AM
Just to say thanks for a really useful plugin. Installed it on WP 1.5.1.2 no problems at all.
June 19th, 2005 at 10:13 AM
Great plugin. Thanks. A small sort-of-an-bug though. I use a localized version of WP and I get some meta information text about the localized version in the Custom feeds textarea. Easy to fix. I changed
<textarea name="dashboard_custom_feeds" rows="10" cols="80" id="dashboard_custom_feeds"><?php _e(get_option('dashboard_custom_feeds')); ?></textarea>to
<textarea name="dashboard_custom_feeds" rows="10" cols="80" id="dashboard_custom_feeds"><?php __(get_option(’dashboard_custom_feeds’)); ?></textarea>June 19th, 2005 at 11:32 AM
Oh, nevermind. The problem is somewhere deeper.
June 20th, 2005 at 11:28 AM
Hmm… I don’t know where that would be coming from. Does it only come up if you have custom feeds?
June 27th, 2005 at 1:23 AM
thank you for the plug-in.
i am receiving an error message pasted below,
Warning: main(../dashboardopts/admin.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/ratherbe/public_html/Art-Blogs/wp-admin/index.php on line 2
Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required ‘../dashboardopts/admin.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/ratherbe/public_html/Art-Blogs/wp-admin/index.php on line 2
i dont knpw php YET, so please advise to a newbie, thank you
June 27th, 2005 at 1:41 AM
i changed line 2 to
require_once(’admin.php’);
then I received another error pasted below:
Parse error: parse error, unexpected $ in /home/ratherbe/public_html/Art-Blogs/wp-admin/index.php on line 76
line 76 reads
if (0
June 27th, 2005 at 1:46 AM
oooppss i fixed the problem, maybe the more i write the more i can figure this out???
thanks, CHRIS !
June 27th, 2005 at 6:18 AM
Yup. Custom feeds. I haven’t had time to look into this closer but somehow the plugin reads/shows something it should not. Everything works quite well though so I’m not too worried.
July 4th, 2005 at 6:06 PM
Looking at dashboardopts.php it seems odd that the code is “translating” the values of various options using _e(). I think the proper way would be to use echo() instead.
For example, the optional feeds are a long string with backticks in it (the “dashboard_custom_feeds” option) — it makes no sense to translate that string!
I think all instances of “_e” should be replaced with “echo”, since none of the static strings cannot be expected to be found in the default translation domain (such as “Dashboard Options”).
July 6th, 2005 at 4:06 PM
Yes, replacing all instances of “_e” with “echo” in dashboardopts.php AND deleting unwanted text from the custom feeds section does the trick. Thank you.
July 7th, 2005 at 2:02 PM
Looks like I need to go in and update the plugin.
I must have been half-asleep when I used _e() instead of echo. Thanks to both of you for catching and working out the issue
July 15th, 2005 at 11:38 AM
Thank you very much for this plugin. The dashboard was taking 30 seconds to load on DSL. Now I’m rid of it.
knotty
July 15th, 2005 at 10:23 PM
Thanks mate! This rocks. I got rid of all the wordpress feeds and replaced them with our own feeds! Thanks heaps.
July 21st, 2005 at 7:22 PM
I found a work around that seems to work for the peekaboo bug in the custom text.
I also couldn’t see the text until I highlighted it, thank to my wonderful IE 6.0 browser.
So, I copied the text in Microsoft Word, Highlight the text, made it bold, and then clicked
the Justify button to make the lines all about the same length. Works great!
July 22nd, 2005 at 4:16 PM
Excellent plugin! I had already modified my dashboard but it’s nice to being your tool in.
I just had one problem: I couldn’t disable the Other WP News. When I checked the box it disabled the Development Blog. I ended up going in and commenting out the Other WP News section.
Otherwise great work! I’m curious to see what else you have in store for us.
July 22nd, 2005 at 6:23 PM
HardinComp, what version of WordPress are you using?
It was built (and is currently running on) a WordPress 1.5 system here. Perhaps there are some minor differences in the index.php files between 1.5 and 1.5.1 that had you editing a different section?
Hard to say without seeing what you modified, but so long as it’s useful to you then that’s good!
July 22nd, 2005 at 6:29 PM
Dashboard Options has been updated to 1.3.3 to take care of the issue that Kimmo and others pointed out above (with the _e() function). Thanks Kimmo and K, you got credit up there in the version info
July 22nd, 2005 at 7:42 PM
The “justify text” worked to eliminate the “peekaboo” until I changed the text, then I couldn’t get it to work again.
Started looking deeper tonight. The custom text area on the page is short up top on the Dashboard, then longer further down the page after it exceeds the “Latest Activity” block on the right. Got me to thinking about “wraps”. I stuffed the custom text full of periods before my text, and, sure enough, the peekaboo problem is only in the shorter area at the top. There is no peekaboo problem in the wider area below the Last Activity box.
So, I’ve never seen CSS before yesterday, but it made sense that the “line-height: 100%;” fix should be applied to the “wraps”. I made the following changes:
Old wrap entries in wp-admin.css file:
.wrap {
background: #fff;
border: 1px solid #ccc;
clear: both;
margin: 15px 5%;
padding: .5em 1em;
}
.wrap h2 {
margin: 6px 0;
New entries for wraps:
.wrap {
line-height: 100%;
background: #fff;
border: 1px solid #ccc;
clear: both;
margin: 15px 5%;
padding: .5em 1em;
}
.wrap h2 {
line-height: 100%;
margin: 6px 0;
…and the peekaboo problem now is really gone.
How’s that for “winging it”? ;-}
Erich
July 27th, 2005 at 1:34 AM
this rocks. you rock. thank you for sharing and helping people out. i send you a virtual beer and great coding karma !!!
August 7th, 2005 at 3:34 PM
“Thanks Kimmo and K, you got credit up there in the version info”
Whoa! Thanks.
August 8th, 2005 at 2:59 PM
Thanks, Chris! It’s a nice plugin!
In case anyone finds it useful, here is a patch file for modifying wp-admin/index-php:
ftp://ftp.gw.com/pub/people/kim/patches/wordpress/cjb-dashboard-admin-index.diff
I’ve also followed these instructions for fixing the Incoming Links functionality:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/40018 (see the 3rd message in the thread)
August 17th, 2005 at 9:51 AM
Great Plug In! Bravo!!!!!!!!
August 27th, 2005 at 10:06 AM
Oh! Please, send me e-mail how can I do for feeds displeyng completely (not only titles)
August 30th, 2005 at 5:41 PM
I am using WordPress 1.5, DashboardOpts 1.3.3.
When I click Dashboard, it is blank. It’s only when I point at the tabs along the top that the custom message appears.
Also, the “g” of “page”, has the bottom cut off, as have the “p”s, in fact the bottom of the entire line is cut off, might be a css problem.
Finally, is there any way to COMPLETELY remove Dashboard tab, rather than displaying it with nothing on, or to make “Latest Activity” fill the whole
page?
August 30th, 2005 at 5:50 PM
Lol, don’t worry, sorted this now.
September 1st, 2005 at 7:42 PM
Oh, I so love this!
The dashboard was getting on my nerves.
Now I’m probably getting on your nerves:
Is there an easy way to like post into the dashboard? So that you can like sort a post instead of into a category into the dashboard so other user can read and comment it without it appearing on the page the visitor sees?
September 2nd, 2005 at 3:33 PM
Brilliant.
That is all.
September 9th, 2005 at 5:24 AM
Nice and useful. I installed it on the blogs I manage.
October 4th, 2005 at 9:55 AM
The version number in the 1.3.3 is different in line 19 - reads 1.3.2 rather than 1.3.3. I kept thinking I hadn’t updated…
great plugin
October 4th, 2005 at 4:36 PM
Hi Setti,
I saw your comment (ack, from a month ago! whoops!) about getting the full content of a RSS.
Look for this line in dashboardopts.php
$output .= "<li><a href=\"".wp_filter_kses($item['link'])."\">".wp_specialchars($item['title'])."</a></li>\n";Where it says $item[’title’] try replacing $item[’title’] with $item[’summary’].
If you are comfortable with making more modifications, you could try changing it so that the title is the link and you then display the summary below it. Perhaps something like:
$output .= "<li><a href=\"".wp_filter_kses($item['link'])."\">".wp_specialchars($item['title'])."<br/> ".wp_specialchars($item['summary'])."</a></li>\n";The above changes haven’t been tested, so I’m not sure how they will look or what kinds of results you will have with them, but they should be a good starting point at least.
October 17th, 2005 at 7:09 PM
Hello Chris,
Thank you very much for the plugin. We here at The TeenTec Podcast love it.
We use it primarily as a checklist kind of thing.
Thank you again!
Shuai King
October 23rd, 2005 at 5:32 AM
Thanks Chris! I was getting really annoyed at those darned feeds - sometimes I would wait a minute and a half before the page loaded. Also this seems to help people suffering from the ‘white page’ after login dilemma too
Great job! I posted it as a fix on my blog (http://alphalpha.homeunix.org:6336/vuulf/?p=40) and at WordPress Forums (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/47598#post-262774)
-=[V]=-
October 23rd, 2005 at 9:28 AM
Hey VuULF, glad it’s useful for you
One of these days I need to get around to upgrading my WP installation and making sure that Dashboard Options keeps working with it. From your experience, though, it sounds fairly compatible with 1.5.2.
October 28th, 2005 at 11:08 PM
So far it is working like a charm on 1.5.2
Have verified that it can be used to fix the ‘white page’ login anomaly on a friend’s blog who was having that problem (1.5.2 as well).
-=[V]=-
November 11th, 2005 at 2:57 AM
Great plugin! Nice to not have the dashboard slowing down admin login.
MySQL 4.1.12a-nt, PHP 4.41, WordPress 1.5.2, IIS 5.1 (XP-Pro). The plugin worked a treat, no problems with *it* at all. Very nice code.
I was a little confused with different responses from Firefox 1.0.7 and IE6. Like Adam said, “It?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s only when I point at the tabs along the top that the custom message appears.” For me, that is true only with IE, it doesn’t happen with Firefox. I’ve not found a fix for IE in that regard, but I think it’s a table rendering focus issue that I ran into once before in my own coding.
The only Firefox problem was the cursed “white screen after login” (and logoff) problem, and for me it was caused by the Firefox extension “Refresh Blocker” - just disabling it made the white screen problem go away (turn it back on, the problem comes back).
But your code seems to work flawless, Chris. Nice job!
November 27th, 2005 at 7:39 PM
What does the .DS_Store file do and where does it go? Thanks!
December 9th, 2005 at 2:12 AM
Hi Chris,
Great plugin! Thanks! I am having one small issue though… when I get everything setup and I type in my custom message the Dashboard window is left blank. My custom message seems to appear if I hold my mouse down and highlight the text?
I have read through here and it seems it’s the “peekaboo” issue?
Forgive me for being stupid but which part of which file do I need to edit/modify to prevent this happening and allow my custom dashboard text to display properly?
Thanks Chris, Hope to hear back soon!
Carl Sorensen
December 29th, 2005 at 1:51 AM
After following the steps, when I try to update my Dashboard options and click the “Update Settings” button I get a lot of PHP errors:
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ’show_dev_feed'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’show_dev_feed'’ LIMIT 1
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ’show_other_feed'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’show_other_feed'’ LIMIT 1
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ’show_technorati_feed'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’show_technorati_feed'’ LIMIT 1
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘dashboard_message_ul'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’dashboard_message_ul'’ LIMIT 1
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘dashboard_show_message'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’dashboard_show_message'’ LIMIT 1
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘dashboard_message'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’dashboard_message'’ LIMIT 1
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘dashboard_eval_message_as_php'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’dashboard_eval_message_as_php'’ LIMIT 1
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘dashboard_custom_feeds'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’dashboard_custom_feeds'’ LIMIT 1
Warning: Cannot add header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/virtual/site21/fst/var/www/html/wp-includes/wp-db.php:102) in /home/virtual/site21/fst/var/www/html/wp-includes/pluggable-functions.php on line 194
December 29th, 2005 at 10:38 PM
Regarding Dave’s comment above:
I’m holding a conversation with Dave via e-mail, but my preliminary results indicate that the main problem with Dashboard Options and WordPress 2.0 is solely related to how options are saved. A very minor modification seems to be allowing the plugin to function on my development blog that is using WordPress 2.0.
The instructions also appear to carry over almost seamlessly. There is one minor modification that is only a difference in the descriptive text that WordPress outputs and that I have listed to find.
January 12th, 2006 at 3:45 AM
hi there,
when will the hack for 2.0 will come out ?
January 16th, 2006 at 11:50 AM
Hey there,
I love your plugin, but i’ve upgraded to WP2. Any idea when an updated version will be released?
Thanks!
January 29th, 2006 at 1:00 PM
nice one sir. thanks for it works good with wp1.5 will v2 be out ?
February 5th, 2006 at 5:10 AM
I manage a blog with 25 very active authors and Dashboard Options is the plugin I miss the most now that I upgraded to wp201. It’s a great place to post announcements, howtos for my authors (visual rich editor howto, image howto…!). Moreover, culling the feeds speeds up load time and I am the only one reading them anyway (on planet.wordpress.org)
Great plugin! Looking forward for next version.
February 18th, 2006 at 2:19 PM
Same as above, I also look forward to a WP2-compatible version. It’s really a great plugin and I hope you can get to update it (or give a hack that we can do to make it work) as soon as possible.
Thanks!
March 17th, 2006 at 9:26 AM
I am also getting the same errors Dave got. Please let me know when a fix is in.
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ’show_dev_feed'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’show_dev_feed'’ LIMIT 1
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ’show_other_feed'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’show_other_feed'’ LIMIT 1
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ’show_technorati_feed'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’show_technorati_feed'’ LIMIT 1
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘dashboard_message_ul'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’dashboard_message_ul'’ LIMIT 1
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘dashboard_show_message'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’dashboard_show_message'’ LIMIT 1
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘dashboard_message'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’dashboard_message'’ LIMIT 1
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘dashboard_eval_message_as_php'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’dashboard_eval_message_as_php'’ LIMIT 1
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘dashboard_custom_feeds'’ LIMIT 1′ at line 1]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘’dashboard_custom_feeds'’ LIMIT 1
March 19th, 2006 at 1:47 PM
Great plugin. Well done.
Doing my nut looking for the source of the Update Settings bug reported by Dave (2005-12-29) on WP2. Like others I would appreciate the details of the change you said you made to get it to work on your WP2 blog … just to tide us over …
Thanks.
March 21st, 2006 at 9:21 PM
this sounds like exactly the plugin i have been waiting for. Unfortunately I’m not able to download it. I get a 404 message.
March 21st, 2006 at 9:26 PM
Whoops, I killed a symlink while updating to WP2. Heh, funny that you were trying to get it just as I was breaking it
It’s fixed now, thanks for the heads up!
March 26th, 2006 at 9:17 AM
Successfully tested on two wp 2.02 of mine. Thak you!
April 3rd, 2006 at 3:43 PM
Chris,
For some reason, the plugin is giving me a “page not found” error when I press the “Update Options” button after unchecking all 3 boxes. I’m not even trying to do a custom message yet or anything.
Can you help me isolate the problem? This plugin would really help me a out a ton.
Eric
April 3rd, 2006 at 3:44 PM
Sorry– I should also note… I’m running WP 1.5, and I did the process by dropping in the appropriate index.php file into my wp-admin, and adding the other file into my plugins.
April 3rd, 2006 at 5:03 PM
Chris,
Just an update: I’m running WP 1.5.2, and I’ve tried both dropping in the index.php file you give us, as well as manually editing it as well.
On my Safari-running Mac OSX, instead of the “page not found” error coming up, nothing happens when I click the “Update Options” button.
I’ve thumbed through the comments here, and I’m not really seeing anyone else experiencing anything similar. Also, I too ran into the peekaboo bug for a little bit when I tried looking at the dashboard in IE.
Eric
April 5th, 2006 at 12:43 PM
Chris–
I got the plugin working great on my WP 1.5.2… I originally had the peekaboo error, but then I put in Erich Boch’s fix found in the thread here, and now it works great on all browsers!!!! Thanks for a great plugin!
Eric
April 11th, 2006 at 6:22 PM
Eric-
Glad to hear its finally been worked out, though I do wish we had a “why” and not just a work-around (Eric sent me an e-mail where he got his plugins all working by uninstalling them all, then installing Dashboard Options and then installing the other plugins).
I’ve also added a link a the top of the page to the fix Erich Brown used for the Peek-a-Boo bug in IE.
June 2nd, 2006 at 11:51 AM
Looks like 2.0.3 broke this, can someone else verify?
June 5th, 2006 at 8:04 AM
Definitely be appreciated if someone can confirm Sam’s experience. I haven’t upgraded to 2.0.3 and probably won’t for a bit at least (getting ready to go on vacation), so I can’t tell on this side.
Can you describe how it broke? Perhaps you just need to replace or edit the wp-admin/index.php again?
June 5th, 2006 at 8:12 AM
Ok, I’ve confirmed that it works in 2.0.3 but something is broken with saving the options.
I’ll have to look at it later (either after work or after my vacation). So right now, it works but saving the options is, at the very least, goofy.
June 7th, 2006 at 10:19 PM
This would be great if you could allow only the admin to see the feeds and such. Regardless, I like what you have done. Thank you.
June 13th, 2006 at 7:17 AM
I removed the plugin from its custom directory and chucked it in with all the others, and the updating error went away.
June 29th, 2006 at 6:06 AM
This is great, I was struggling with this slow loading problem but this helped me a great deal.
Thanks.
July 22nd, 2006 at 11:52 AM
Nice plugin. I just made a “Simple Installaton Version” from v1.4.2, using the technique I have learned form X-dashboard. It is only for wordpress 2.0.3, and works fine in my websites. You can download this version from (http://jerome.zh-tw.org/wp-content/dashboardopts.zip)
3 steps installation :
1. Extract dashboardopts.zip, there is only one file: dashboardopts.php.
2. Upload dashboardopts.php to your plugin fold.
3. Login to your admin panel and go to plugins page. Activate the Dashboard Options plugin.
July 27th, 2006 at 3:01 PM
Hi! I absolutely love this plugin! One quick question, I noticed in the instructions for the custom RSS field it specifies:
RSS Feed URL`Title`Link`stylesheet class`style`id`max items
but on the site here it says:
RSS Feed URL`Title`Link`stylesheet class`style`id
I couldn’t get the ‘max items’ to work and it looks like maybe it isn’t supported? Is there something I’m missing?
Thanks again!
Chris
July 27th, 2006 at 3:49 PM
Hi Chris, that’s a bug
Try 1.4.3 (which I just uploaded), that should fix it. I’ve sent you an e-mail as well.
July 27th, 2006 at 5:52 PM
Awesome, thanks for the quick reply. I’ll reiterate, I love this plugin. The Dashboard has been the number one annoyance for me since I started using Wordpress. My users just do not care about reading feeds from wordpress news sites. I love the ability to add custom feeds as well.
Thanks again!
Chris
August 10th, 2006 at 3:06 AM
HI Chris,
Great plugin. One question - I seem to only be able to view the headlines of my feeds rather than headline and short summary like the wordpress theme. Any ideas?
Regards,
CB
August 10th, 2006 at 7:44 AM
Hi CB,
Looks like the WP team also displays the description for some of the feeds. If you want that on all of the feeds displayed by Dashboard Options, you can modify the plugin.
Find the following in the plugin:
$output .= "<li><a href=\"".wp_filter_kses($item['link'])."\">".wp_specialchars($item['title'])."</a></li>\n";That’s the entry that displays each feed item. If you would like it to display the feed item’s description as well, you’d use wp_specialchars($item[’description’]). I don’t know what kind of formatting you want to use, that would depend on how you want it to look. You could always use a simple <br /> after the link and before the </li>.
This may be something I add as a feature for future versions, but then I have to decide how most people would like to have that displayed
October 31st, 2006 at 3:55 PM
Just to say that Jerome’s Simple Install works for my WP 2.0.3!
It’s a 5 second install and off you go. Only problem is I can’t seem to add custom feeds, but that maybe something I’m doing. Maybe you ought to look at his code and replicate it for the full plugin?
November 21st, 2006 at 10:41 AM
for your information - there is an easy way how to do it without modifying the dashboard file - see x-dashboard plugin - it easily hide the existing dashboard from top menu and put there its own, works as a charm.
November 25th, 2006 at 1:56 PM
To jaggs:
I’m glad that you like my version, but I don’t understand your problem of “cannot add custom feeds”. It works just fine on my website (WP 2.05).
To noname:
Yes, this is what I did, to grab some codes from x-dashboard.
you can still download my 5 second install version from (http://jerome.zh-tw.org/wp-content/dashboardopts.zip).
January 6th, 2007 at 4:15 AM
Pardon my ignorance put I only get the titles of the post from the feeds I have added, I would like to also get part of the body or the entire body of each post.. Kind of like the “WordPress Development Blog” section.. Anyway to get this?
Thanks for this great plugin! I really enjoy it!!
January 6th, 2007 at 5:20 AM
Ok! I suck! I know I know!! The thing is only 4 comment over mine!! :S .. But still, I played around with that option and it does allow me to get the body of the post but some more coding is required to make it look.. bearable!
January 6th, 2007 at 6:59 AM
Jerome,
Nice addition
I’ve linked to your original comment in the installation instructions above, but I haven’t integrated the code. If you’re ok with it, I think I might but I have to work out how to make it optional from within WordPress first.
January 21st, 2007 at 2:32 PM
Great, it work well on french WordPress 2.0.1 ! Thanks !!
January 23rd, 2007 at 9:06 AM
It won’t work on WP 2.1 it seems, correct?
January 23rd, 2007 at 10:14 AM
Hi Joost,
That may very well be, I haven’t followed the WP upgrades past (I think) 2.0.4. I haven’t looked at 2.1 yet at all, for installation or for plugin compatibility. I’ll try to make some time to check it out, but no promises
February 5th, 2007 at 3:02 PM
I am able to get this working for WP 2.1. Since the index.php has changed since your version, the best strategy is to do the replacement work manually. Also, most of the functions that need replacing are in index-extra.php . Send me an email and we might be able to get out a WP 2.1 release.
February 10th, 2007 at 9:47 AM
hi there.. has this been updated for wordpress 2.1 yet??
cheers
February 10th, 2007 at 12:01 PM
Hi Kim, I sent Aniah an e-mail this week, but haven’t heard back yet so while I know that there’s at least one version out there somewhere that works with 2.1, I don’t have it
I might get an opportunity to look at 2.1 over the next two weeks since I’ve got some time off work coming up.
March 4th, 2007 at 2:58 PM
Good idea, I’ve loaded and tested it on 2.1.2 on both my devel and production site.
Question: I noticed it uses user level and not user role to control access to changing the custom message field.
Also, as someone else posted, it would be nice to have feeds displayed or not displayed based on user role.
Again, good job!
Jim
March 4th, 2007 at 2:59 PM
PS - it would be nice to us Unix types if your file names did not contain any spaces.
Jim
March 4th, 2007 at 3:49 PM
Hi Jim,
Thanks for the comments. It uses user level because, I think, at the time that it was written “user role” didn’t exist
I haven’t updated it for 2.1 because I haven’t been keeping up with the WP versions past 2.0.3 (geez, 2.0.9 and 2.1.2 — hmm, maybe I should do at least one of those upgrades).
Actually, if I do 2.1 I may just re-write the plugin from the ground up rather than trying to maintain a single plugin that works with 1.5, 2.0 and 2.1.
As for spaces in the file name, that’s what tab-complete in the CLI is for
I’ve gone and changed the files (except for the one with the gratuitously long name) to use underscores instead of spaces.
March 7th, 2007 at 8:44 AM
chris,
I’m really happy to see the “Jerome’s Version” inside the installation instructions. Also, I am waiting for your new dashboard-option for WP 2.1.2. The new dashboard in WP 2.1.2 is a little different from the WP 2.0.3 (its using ajax effect, and new “Scheduled Posts” section in sidebar if the post timestamp set in the future.)
I think it is not only difficult to edit wp-admin/index.php for many people but also annoying whenever upgrading wordpress. Maybe the overriding method is a acceptable solution in your next version….
March 27th, 2007 at 12:09 PM
too difficult to find plugin like this, increase the power of wordpress theme.
July 13th, 2007 at 2:57 AM
Absolutely wonderful plugin =)
November 13th, 2007 at 2:48 PM
Cheers for this!
December 11th, 2007 at 10:40 AM
thx for this pretty cool plugin!
March 9th, 2008 at 2:55 PM
has this been updated for wordpress 2.3.3 ??
March 9th, 2008 at 3:15 PM
Hi rami, it has not been - I haven’t updated my on WP back end in quite awhile (shhh!) and so haven’t had a reason/motivation to update it. If you do update it/tweak it/find that it works in 2.3.3, please feel free to let me know - I’d be more than willing to put a 2.3.3 version into the zip file with credit to you in there.
April 28th, 2008 at 9:01 PM
Hi Chris,
I’m using your plugin and it works great. I found that with one of the 2.3.x updates they changed the ‘categories’ table to ‘terms’. So in ‘wp2.0_admin_index.php’ will need to change ‘$wpdb->categories’ to ‘$wpdb->terms’ for the blog stats on the admin dashboard to work. Hope this helps