Another *nix coder/sysadmin
hacking in the night…

I saw an interesting comment from Andy Skelton over here:

“Hey there! Nice work on this plugin/widget code. However, it won’t work on future versions of WordPress because you’ve queried a table that will no longer be available. Links are tricky business these days… “

Interesting. The widget I just wrote also queries the database table directly. The API doesn’t allow for much manipulation of the links, as it has anchor tags hard-coded in (not viable for use in a drop down list).

I’m wondering if there is a reference online for how newer versions will change in regards to this? I’m assuming he’s referring to WP 2.1.

It would also be nice if the API allowed for a way to use the data like I am, without needing to re-implement the functions to format them appropriately. get_archives() was designed intelligently for this type of use. Unfortunately get_links() and list_cats() are not.

WordPress | 5 Comments »

Made a new widget: Drop-down Links Widget

I figured given the popularity of the Drop-down Archives Widget, that a drop-down version of the links list was probably in order. I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of different feeds that I watch (via a Gregarius installation).

I’ve added the sanity check of silently failing if the AWP is not activated to this from the beginning.

Widgets, WordPress | No Comments »

I’ve rolled new versions of the widgets with a minor bugfix. If you activate a widget without having the AutoMattic Widgets Plugin (AWP) turned on, you’ll either get a blank page on your site or you’ll get an error (most likely “Fatal error: Call to undefined function register_sidebar_widget()“).

The new versions will silently bypass the widget registration process if the AWP is not activated. It’s not exactly the way I wanted to do it, as I would have preferred to deactivate the widget automatically if the AWP wasn’t activated. The problem is, given how plugins are loaded, my widgets are often loaded before AWP, so they would never be active.

New versions:

• Category Replacement Widget version 0.5
• Drop-down Archives Widget version 0.2
• Get Weather Widget version 0.2

Widgets, WordPress | 3 Comments »

Thanks to an astute observation by Krista, I’ve rolled a new version of the CRw which will support permalinks correctly (”/?cat=15″ style and “/category/wordpress/widgets/” style).

Category Replacement widget version 0.4

Widgets, WordPress | 1 Comment »