In typical Just Tadlock fashion, he has written and published another in-depth tutorial that covers User Taxonomies. The tutorial is not for the faint of heart as it requires that you know how a few sections of WordPress work such as plugins, themes, users, and the taxonomies themselves. Just imagine how awesome the Codex would be if Justin wrote the entire thing! ∞
Justin Tadlock On Menus In WP 3.0
Justin Tadlock has an excellent post online talking about the new menus feature in WordPress 3.0. The post title says it all. Goodbye, headaches. Hello, Menus!. As I have reviewed numerous commercial WordPress themes along with a few free ones, I’ve noticed that just about each one tackles the menu system differently. The best system I’ve used to date was in iThemes Builder which provided the textual names of my categories and then provided check boxes to either show them, or hide them within the menu. There are too many themes that insist on the user knowing which ID numbers for categories they would like to show or hide. Thankfully, the menu system in WordPress 3.0 will help change all of this and provide a standard for all theme developers to go by.
In Justin’s post, he walks users and developers through the new menus feature and explains how to add it to a theme that does not yet support it.
New Role Management Plugin Available For Beta
Remember when I mentioned that Justin Tadlock was working on a new plugin to manage roles and capabilities for users in WordPress? A few days ago, Justin announced that the first beta version of the plugin is available to the public. So far, here is what you can do with the plugin.
- Edit Roles: Edit your user roles and their capabilities.
- New Roles: Create new roles for use on your site.
- Content Permissions: Adds a meta box on your write post/page editor that allows you to restrict content to specific roles.
- Widgets: Adds a login form widget and user-listing widget that you can use in any widget area on your site.
- Shortcodes: Creates shortcodes that you can use to restrict or allow access to certain parts of your posts and pages (or any other shortcode-capable area).
- Template Tags: New functions for use within your WordPress theme for various things.
- Private Blog: Allows you to create a private blog that can only be accessed by users that are logged in (redirects them to the login page).
Justin is currently looking for feedback and considering the popularity from when he mentioned the idea, I’m sure he’ll get it. P.S. As for my idea regarding the name of the plugin, how about this: Cap And Role.
Help Justin Tadlock Develop A User Management Plugin
A few days ago, Justin Tadlock put a link out on Twitter to a screenshot of a plugin he was developing that dealt with user management. Apparently, this type of plugin is in high demand and due to the amount of interest he’s received, he is going ahead with development but he needs our help.
The goal of this plugin is to be a complete management system for users, roles, and permissions. I want it to fit in with your administration panel and feel like it has always been there. It needs to work completely within the bounds of WordPress too. I’ve seen some plugins that don’t take advantage of WordPress’s roles and capabilities system.
The plugin will be developed in a BuddyPress like fashion where it will be made up of a number of different components, each which can be turned on or off by the site administrator. Think of it as a use only what you need type of system.
On the heels of this announcement by Justin Tadlock, the most recent WordPress developers chat featured an agenda item that dealt specifically with the roles and capabilities system in WordPress. You can read what was discussed in that chat here. The proposed system has me questioning whether Justin should be waiting for the new system to come into play or if he should continue on the track that he’s on.
Justin Tadlock On Creating Custom bbPress Views
Justin Tadlock who uses bbPress to power his support forums for the Theme Hybrid framework has published a tutorial on how to create custom views in bbPress. Custom views are pretty cool as they allow you to create different ways of viewing topics on a bbPress powered forum.
Speaking of bbPress, don’t forget to tune into WordPress Weekly this Friday evening as my scheduled guest is Sam Bauers, lead developer of the bbPress project.
A Theme I Can Be Critical About
Justin Tadlock has released a new child theme for the Hybrid Framework called Critical. This theme encompasses the use of custom taxonomies that are now built within WordPress. However, Justin doesn’t like releasing his personal designs so he has released the theme as a blank slate allowing you to easily add your personal touch to the theme. The theme heavily uses his Get The Image script while also integrating well with the WP Post Ratings plugin by Lester Chen.
You can view a demo of the theme here. In order to use it, you’ll need to be running the latest version of the Hybrid Theme Framework with WordPress 2.8 or higher.
Justin Tadlock Releases Hybrid News Theme
Just Tadlock (community member greenshady) has released a new child theme based on his theme framework ‘ThemeHybrid‘. If we were playing a drinking game which would be acceptable considering this is a tavern, you folks ought to be drunk by now. With that said, the Hybrid News theme features much of what you would expect a newsy type theme to have with a bit of Justin’s magic thrown in.
Hybrid News Theme In Action
- Featured post block which is animated
- Post thumbnails for articles on the front page
- Four widget areas in the footer
- Two right handed skinny sidebars
- Featured video block
- Four-level drop-down menu
- A Tabber that features Hot Tags, Random Posts, and your Archives
- Fully compliant with WordPress 2.7
Giving the theme a good look over from the demo which is located here, looks like Hybrid News could easily fit the bill for many of you still looking for a free, news layout type of theme. One thing I noticed which is really nice is that, the post thumbnails as well as the featured posts appear to take the first image which shows up in the post content and uses that as the thumbnail, scaling down or up in size automatically. This is a huge time saver, especially compared to the way in which I currently have to apply an image URL to a post_thumbnail custom field for it to work properly in the theme WPTavern is using.