Tag Archives: Posts By Tag

Ability to sort posts, in Posts By Tag Plugin

Published Sep 17, 2009 | In WordPress

Ability to sort posts, in Posts By Tag Plugin

I recently updated my Posts By Tag Plugin, to v 0.4

New Features

The main new feature of this update is that, now you have the option to choose the order in which the posts should be displayed in the widget. The credit for this feature goes entirely to Michael, because he is the one who code it. He sent me the modified file and I have just checked it into the Plugin’s SVN and modified the Readme file. (Can anyone expect more ;) ) Thanks Michael.

Screenshot

The following is the screenshot of the widgets page where now you have to option to choose whether the posts should be displayed in ascending or descending order by date.

posts-by-tag-settings

Download

You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s homepage.

Feedback

Please keep the feedback coming and if you want me to add any new features or find a bug, please leave a comment.

Vote for the Plugin

If you have used this Plugin and like it, please vote it and help me win the WordPress Plugin competition.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Using WordPress built-in tag auto complete script in your Plugins

Published Aug 25, 2009 | In WordPress

Using WordPress built-in tag auto complete script in your Plugins

When I released my Posts By Tag WordPress Plugin, I promised to write a post explaining how to use the built-in auto complete tags script in WordPress, and so here is how you do it. ;)

jQuery Plugin

WordPress has a jQuery Plugin called suggest, which will do the heavy lifting for us. To use this Plugin, you have to first enqueue the script using the wp_enqueue_script() function

// Register hooks
add_action('admin_print_scripts', 'add_script');
 
/**
 * Add script to admin page
 */
function add_script() {
    // Build in tag auto complete script
    wp_enqueue_script( 'suggest' );
}

Once the script is included, you have to just call a method called suggest on your jQuery collection and everything else will be taken care for you. 

<?php
/**
 * add script to admin page
 */
function add_script_config() {
?>
 
    <script type="text/javascript" >
    // Function to add auto suggest
    function setSuggest(id) {
        jQuery('#' + id).suggest("<?php echo get_bloginfo('wpurl'); ?>/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=ajax-tag-search&tax=post_tag");
    }
    </script>
<?php
}
?>

If you want to support multiple tags, then you can use the following options.

  • multiple – to enable multiple tags to be entered, pass true
  • multipleSep – The separator symbol for multiple tags

so the code will be

<?php
/**
 * add script to admin page
 */
function add_script_config() {
?>
 
    <script type="text/javascript" >
    // Function to add auto suggest
    function setSuggest(id) {
        jQuery('#' + id).suggest("<?php echo get_bloginfo('wpurl'); ?>/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=ajax-tag-search&tax=post_tag", {multiple:true, multipleSep: ","});
    }
    </script>
<?php
}
?>

You can also use this script to auto complete other custom taxonomies, which were introduced in WordPress 2.8. For that you have to change the tax parameter in the url. The following are the default taxonomies that are available.

  • post_tag
  • link_category
  • category

In addition to them you can also use your custom taxonomies.

So the complete code is

<?php
// Register hooks
add_action('admin_print_scripts', 'add_script');
add_action('admin_head', 'add_script_config');
 
/**
 * Add script to admin page
 */
function add_script() {
    // Build in tag auto complete script
    wp_enqueue_script( 'suggest' );
}
 
/**
 * add script to admin page
 */
function add_script_config() {
?>
 
    <script type="text/javascript" >
    // Function to add auto suggest
    function setSuggest(id) {
        jQuery('#' + id).suggest("<?php echo get_bloginfo('wpurl'); ?>/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=ajax-tag-search&tax=post_tag", {multiple:true, multipleSep: ","});
    }
    </script>
<?php
}
?>


The only cavet to this method is that right now the admin-ajax.php file needs you to be logged in and therefore can only be used in admin pages. But in WordPress 2.9 even anonymous users can load admin-ajax.php file. If you need use auto tag completing in blog pages, then you may have to wait till 2.9 is released :)

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Posts By Tag 0.3

Published Aug 14, 2009 | In WordPress

Posts By Tag 0.3

Just a quick note, to let you all know that I have updated my Posts By Tag WordPress Plugin to version 0.3

Features

The following are the changes in the new version

Improvements to caching

Now the Plugin caches the entire HTML generated by the widget, not just the query which is used to retrieve posts. This should improve the performance of the Plugin and will reduce some mill-seconds of your page load time, if you have enabled caching.

Turkish Translation

The credit for this goes to Yakup Gövler. I have checked in the Turkish .po and .mo files, in this release.

If you are willing to do translation for the Plugin, use the pot file to create the .po files for your language and let me know. I will add it to the Plugin after giving credit to you.

Update

You can download the latest version of the Plugin form its home page. It is an optional update and doesn’t change anything in the front-end.

Feedback

As usual, if you have any feedback, queries or questions, feel free and leave a comment.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Display posts from a set of tags in the sidebar

Published Jul 26, 2009 | In WordPress

Display posts from a set of tags in the sidebar

Recently I was looking for ways to display posts from a specific set of tags in the sidebar.

I preferred a sidebar widget rather than making changes directly to the theme files, because if I am using a widget I don’t need to remember to make the change again when choosing a different theme.

A quick search didn’t yield any results which made me to write my own Plugin and thus the Posts By Tag WordPress Plugin was born.

Features

Posts By Tag Plugin provides a sidebar widget (using the new Widget API provided in WordPress 2.8) which can be configured to display posts from a set of tags in the sidebar. You can have multiple widgets with different set of tags configured for each one of them.

Each widget allows you to choose

  • The set of tags whose posts should be displayed
  • The number of posts to be displayed.
  • Option to enable post excerpts to be displayed with post titles.
  • Option to display post thumbnail if present.

Caching

The Plugins caches the posts of each widget separately, and issues database queries only when needed. This will reduce the amount of database queries involved for each page load and will therefore be light on your server.

Screenshot

Tag Posts Widget Settings

Download

You can download the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page. After downloading the zip file, extract it and upload the contents to the wp-content directory. Activate the Plugin from the Plugins page and you should see a new widget called “Tag Posts” in the widgets pages.

Feedback

As usual try out the Plugin and do let me know if you have any feedback, queries or comments.

PS: I am using the built-in tags auto-complete script used in the Write Post page. I will write a separate post explaining how to integrate tags auto-complete script in your Plugins.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments