I haven’t used ad-blockers for a very long time… partly because I haven’t used Firefox (regularly) for a long time, and I’ve been slow to adopt Chrome plugins. Also, I’m a little conflicted about denying site-owners potential income by blocking their ads. So, I’m not an expert on ad-blocking by any means, but I ran into an interesting issue with a client this week that I thought deserved sharing.

My client had chosen to use thumbnails in the Thesis teasers that were 300×250 pixels. Personally I prefer something slightly more “widescreen”, like 300x200px, but it is a food blog, so I think they’d like to show as much of the dishes as they can. We had just finished implementing the design on the website — I had written a little script that grabs the first image uploaded to the post and displays the thumbnail version of that image, if there is no Thesis Thumbnail designated for the post — and the client told me that Adblock Plus was blocking the thumbnails.

Since I don’t use ad-blockers and haven’t used this specific image size much, I’d never encountered this issue, but with the help of Perishable Press and my client we figured it out! The images have -300x250 at the end of their URL (WordPress adds the dimensions to all images it generates), and Adblock Plus was blocking images with -300x250 in their file name. 300×250 is one of the standard ad sizes… So assuming that Adblock Plus only blocks the standard ad sizes, the way to fix this issue in WordPress is to change your image size to something slightly different to 300×250, even if it is just by one or two pixels.

If you need to change all the thumbnails on your site Regenerate Thumbnails is a very effective plugin for regenerating the images after you change the size settings.

I’ve finished the move of kristarella.com to a new server (well, that happened a while ago, but I’ve made more progress since then)!

The improvements to WordPress (WP) over the last couple of years have been great! The integration of WordPressMU with the main WP stream into WP networks was a good move for any one interested in multiple WordPress sites, and custom post types and taxonomies are pretty sweet. So now I have all of those things working over my network, and more. The network is still in progress, some designs and functions are not finished yet, but you’re still welcome to check them out.

• The original kristarella.com blog
• My photoblog now has its own domain
• 365 project blog, which is way behind! but I’ll get there
• Kristarella Studios also has its own site with my portfolio, free skins, and (hopefully) soon paid skins

I need to create a master nav menu to link the sites together and add more content to all of them, but I’m glad that they’re all up and running now.

I’m using Thesis child themes on all of them, which I’m finding very convenient for customising each separately while all using the latest version of Thesis.

I have high hopes of updating these all more regularly— wish me luck! And feel free to take this opportunity to ask me about my sites, Thesis or whatever you fancy.

With the year coming to a close it seems an opportune time to reminisce. I don’t have lots of good memories of this year— having completed a thesis and having not enjoyed it much at all. However, looking back over the last year of posts I think it was a pretty good year for blogging and developing skills of all kinds.

January

To start off the year, I discovered a bit more about using the Mac Color Picker for colour management. I also made my own protective camera wrap in preparation for my trip to San Francisco.

February

Then in February, thanks to his new job at Google, my husband and I got to go to San Francisco. We had to pay for my part of course… It was a great trip though, I loved it.

March

It looks like my first month of honours was a good month for image manipulation, with an Introduction to the GIMP for Creative Curio, a mammoth example of adjusting a fireworks photograph in GIMP…

Easter happened and I was quite a bit more positive about it than in previous years.

I also wrote a sort of photo noir tutorial. Good for learning to use paths to create selections in GIMP.

April

Google brought out a predictive search tool to get tomorrow’s news today, just in time for April Fools’ Day.

Some more fun with GIMP found a newsprint/halftone effect and I also had a wallpaper published among Smashing Magazine’s April wallpapers and wrote a tutorial on it.

Expressive words were good fun and did the rounds of some design and design related blogs.

May

I learnt a lot about WordPress and PHP this year and shared some of it in the form of tutorials. Including, How to create a custom homepage and putting content in that homepage.

I also had the chance to check out a whole lot of image editors for Mac. If you’re a Mac user definitely check out this list, which has both lightweight and heavy duty editors.

I redesigned my blog this year and as part of that process thought a lot about semantic code, CSS and the details of a website, including favicons, which I think no site is complete without.

You just ended that sentence with a preposition— bastard!

Col. Jack O’Neill SG1

June

The second half of the year was very busy at uni and not particularly pleasant, but I did find a little fun and release in The rather difficult Font Game on iLoveTypography.

I also did my first video tutorial about grid masking using Inkscape and GIMP.

July

I created my Haiku blog, which uses a few custom functions to take advantage of categories more.

I began using Coda, a top notch site management and text editing program for Mac. I’ve loved using it in conjunction with MAMP to test and manage sites locally.

September

You can tell August was a nasty month, since there were no posts really worth mentioning! To relieve a little of that uni stress and maintain some semblance of life I took part in the $50 camera challenge, which was excellent.

Somehow, what was honestly an attempt to keep my blog active and put to use some photos I’d taken with my phone, the Life through my phone post was a bit of a hit. I’ve been taking a few photos and even a video on my phone lately, so there could be another one of those coming up.

Now I’m thinking I was just starting to procrastinate at this point: I implemented clickable tags in the WP write panel. Of course, it’s obsolete now that WP has finally implemented that feature themselves. Yay!

October

October was Breast Cancer awareness month again. Although I wasn’t able to do as much as I would have liked (due to it also being thesis writing month *shudder*), I did turn my blog pink and I was able to go to a Pink Ribbon brunch.

November & December

These two months deserve to be rolled into one, since I not only had finished my thesis and was on holidays (until further notice!), but it was a big two months for me and WordPress.

I ported my blog design over to Thesis and I’ve never been happier with it (of course, I have ideas to make it even better). Along with that move came tutorials on full-width headers and full-width footers in Thesis.

At the end of November I went to WordCamp Australia, where I met some excellent people, started some good relationships, and heard some exciting things.

Post WordCamp, I got around to adding location functionality to my photoblog and thought a bit about WordPress licensing and how it relates to themes and affects theme developers.

Tonight is New Years Eve! I don’t think I’ll have a chance to take photos of fireworks, but I think it will be a great hang-out time with friends.

Happy New Year!

Recent GNU GPL issues

During WordCamp Australia, as I mentioned in my post, one of my questions instigated a discussion about the GNU GPL and how themes relate to the WordPress license.

In the last couple of weeks since WordCamp there has been a bit of chatter on Twitter about it. Jeff Waugh agreed to write a post about it, still hoping to read that since (I think) he has a lot of experience with GNU licensing through the Linux community. WordPress.org removed non-GPL themes (or themes that linked to sites promoting premium themes, and spammy themes) from the repository and in response Alister Cameron wrote a post suggesting developers need to be more creative with business models while honouring the GPL (make sure you read the comments for clarification on “free”).

My interest in this topic

Since WordCamp I’ve been trying to read up on the GPL. I am particularly interested in this topic because I’m using Thesis, I’m part of the affiliate program and I provide support on the DIYthemes forum and through my blog. I was amazed when I first saw the Thesis theme: it’s options are great and I love the way it uses custom files and hooks to localise modifications. I am really happy with the way my blog is running right now and I feel like there might be some really cool opportunities ahead of me. So, if “premium” themes are incompatible with the GPL I want to know. If I am going to be involved in using, promoting and helping other people develop their sites with a premium theme, I will need to take a stance on this issue.

The facts

What I’ve managed to gather:

• The GPL stipulates that software be free, meaning free to be modified and free to be redistributed in its unmodified or modified form.
• Free software does not mean you can’t charge for it. You are welcome to charge for WordPress if you want, but you cannot prevent the buyer from changing it or giving it away.
• Any work derived from GPL software that is distributed, must be done so under the GPL.
• You are not obligated to make your modifications of GPL software public if you’re not distributing it.

What are derived works?

To be honest, I think the license is pretty clear and a lot of misunderstanding comes from not reading it properly. However, there is one thing that I’ve found totally unclear, and that is what constitutes a derived work in the context of WordPress.

I think it’s obvious that if you change core files of WordPress, it is a derivative, and if you redistribute that change or the whole modified core it must be GPL. So, are themes and plugins derivatives? Sadly, it pretty much depends on your interpretation and the vibe of the thing.

Some people automatically assume that something that doesn’t function without WordPress is a derived work (does that make every program that runs on Linux based operating systems derivatives?). Some people mustn’t think they are, or they wouldn’t build a business selling themes for which the code cannot be shared. Others don’t understand the license or don’t care about it.

The WordPress Hackers mailing list had a thread that suggested if you use WordPress PHP functions and interact with the core code in that way, then you’ve got a derived work, whereas you could sell images and CSS separately because they don’t interact with the code, just the output, which isn’t covered by the GPL (the bit about the output is my interpretation, without that reasoning the argument makes no sense to me). Alister Cameron has been saying a similar thing regarding business models for theme developers.

Vladimir Prelovac suggests some ways of circumventing the “problem” of GPL by avoiding interacting with WordPress functions. However, it feels like a lot of effort to find loopholes in the license. If you really don’t like the GPL that much, perhaps you should use a different platform.

Matt’s opinion

In a recent interview. It was obvious that Matt Mullenweg considers themes and plugins to be derivatives.

After I read the WordPress license I thought how good it would have been if they had specified what they consider to be derived works. Some programs specify that you can use their functionality without the product being a derived work. Matt addressed that in the interview saying,

There’s a tonne of things you could do, but if we wanted people to do that we would have made an exception in our license; just like The Free Software Foundation recommends making an exception for javascript, or something like that. There’d be a line in our license that says “Oh, by the way, you can do all these things.” It’s not our intention and even if you do find a way around it, it’s not something we want to promote on our website.

Regarding complaints that say WordPress is trying to control what people can say and what they can advertise on their sites:

That doesn’t mean you can’t disagree with WordPress, or anything like that, that’s actually the heart of how WordPress was developed. People disagreeing and fighting and arguing and debating and everything like that, we just don’t want to promote things that are sort of against the guidelines. We’re not one hundred percent consistent there yet… we need to take a sweeping look at pretty much everything on the site and say “Okay, lets really match the guidelines.”

My conclusions

Themes and plugins are considered derived works by lots of people, including Matt Mullenweg. WordPress.org won’t be pursuing action against premium theme makers, but they won’t be promoting non-GPL themes.

GPL is great for the community; it compels people to openness, which is awesome for users and most developers too. Some developers feel GPL makes it too hard to make money with WordPress, but I think there are a lot of ways to build a good business on WordPress even by releasing your theme and plugin source code. Those could include charging for services such as support and also customisation; I can tell you that there are a lot of people who would pay for customisation to their theme whether the theme was free or not, whether it’s easy to work with or not.

Due to the nature of themes and plugins you have to provide the source code for the user to use it. By licensing your code under GPL it allows people to use it how they like, but even if you try to add a license to your code that says you can’t distribute it and they do, what can you do? Not a whole damn lot. If people want to cheat you of the credit you deserve, they will, GPL or not.

There may yet be room to discuss what is actually a derived work. I am yet to see any descriptions of why themes and plugins are not derivatives from folks who don’t think they are. I don’t really want to make a final decision until I do. If you don’t think themes and plugins should be considered derived works and therefore under the GPL, pipe up! Your opinion is under-represented!

I totally support the move at WordPress.org to remove non-GPL themes from the repository, partly because I think it’s good that they promote the openness of the WordPress community, but mostly because WordPress.org can support whoever they want to. No doubt they could have communicated more effectively before creating a big fuss, but hey— hindsight is 20–20.

What do you think?

Reading List

• WordPress license
• The Free Software Definition
• GPL Frequently Asked Questions
• GPL, plugins and themes discussion on the WP mailing list
• Matt Mullenweg, WordPress, GPL, and why I think he really gets it by Alister Cameron
• Interesting WordPress implications
• 2hr Interview with Matt Mullenweg
• (Added 27 December 2008) Removal of over 200 themes? — discussion in the wp-hackers Google group

Was sweet… and by sweet I mean “totally cool”!

Day 1

The first day got off to a decaffeinated start; I thought for sure, a conference for such geeky types would have to have good coffee, alas Nescafé prevailed! On the bright side, the fruit buns were really good.

I’m glad I rocked up with @niphal because at 09:10 (rego time was 9–10am) there was not too many people there. I even made it into a shot titled am i early? (I’m standing near the front wearing a blue singlet).

Our entry tickets/name tags/schedules were cool. They were really simple, but they looked good on brown cardboard and they were so clever! The name was facing the right way up for people looking at you, but if you flipped the page over, the schedule was the right way up for you to look at it.

Jane Wells: The Road to 2.7

Jane Wells spoke about how they got from 2.5 (and 2.6, which is essentially the same interface) to 2.7, which was really interesting. I also had a bit more of a chat with her on the second day about how she ended up working for Automattic.

Usability testing was done on WP 2.5 (even using eye tracking by bouncing lasers off people’s retinas, I think, very cool) and they developed a frame for better usability in WordPress. That experimental framework, which was originally meant to compare how people interacted with WordPress, evolved into WP 2.7.

The new version, which will probably be coming out in the next week or two, looks really exciting! The admin is getting (another) major overhaul: menu items and admin pages are going to be much more accessible, it will take fewer clicks to get wherever you want to go, and the colours and icons will be more subtle and streamlined to let you get on with the business of creating content.

There is also some fantastic inline editing from the admin, including replying to comments from the admin area. You will also be able to upload media without having to create a post— very convenient.

Also, media handling and widgets are getting an overhaul in 2.8 and 2.9. Should be sweet!

Sam Bauers: Prologue Groups

Sam Bauers showed us how they’re using the Prologue theme to run a project management system. It’s purely via the theme architecture, but turns WordPress into a sort of Twitter crossed with Basecamp.

Matt Mullenweg: Keynote Presentation

It was great to hear Matt Mullenweg speak about the history and future of WordPress and about his company Automattic. It’s all come such a long way in the last 5 years and is going to get even more awesome, I’m sure.

A few tidbits:

• Matt started blogging with b2 and WordPress was originally built on/derived from that platform.
• Matt had been saying WordPress was easy enough for his Mum to use, but when she asked to start a blog, he wondered if it really was! (She wanted to blog a to-do list for Matt!)
• WordPress is in its awkward teenage years: rapidly growing and changing. So, it might be a little while before plugin developers feel like they can count on forward compatibility in WP, but if WordPress keeps growing in the direction it has been, it will be worth it!
• Matt loves comments and would like a quick and useful method for keeping up to date and in contact with frequent and interesting commenters.
• The Matrix easter egg is classic. Find the new easter egg in 2.7!
• WordPress.com is pressing 1.33 billion words each month!

I learnt a heap more from Matt when I chatted to him at the end of the second day as well. Apparently you can register taxonomy (tags and categories are examples of taxonomy)! We also mused about geotagging photos and using the exif to show photos on a map. At the moment, I’m able to import EXIF latitude and longitude into the database, I just need to write a function that formats it in a useful way.

Matt Mullenweg & myself (yes, I'm okay with the fact that I'm geeky enough to want a photo with the creator of WordPress)

Matt's + Kristen's feet

Alister Cameron: When is a theme not a theme? When it’s a framework.

Alister Cameron talks about theme frameworks (photo by Halans)

I loved Alister‘s talk about theme “frameworks” or what he’d rather call “base themes”. Basically, base themes are smart themes that have great semantic markup, allowing you to do pretty much anything you want through CSS, hooks and widgets without rearranging your code.

Here’s a brief summary of the themes he discussed, which are on the road to being super base themes:

• Sandbox: smart theme with so many dynamic classes, you can really modify the heck out of it. It’s initial ugly appearance screams “Freedom!” to designers and developers.
• Thematic: it has hooks, it’s SEO ready and is widget ready for essentially every area of the page.
• Carrington: context aware templates, you can create different templates for each element of your page that can change according to user context (I think).
• Hybrid: plugin awareness, e.g., the theme already has good SEO, but if you have the All in One SEO plugin installed it accommodates it nicely. You can use child themes to customise your site and remain future proof when upgrading your theme.
• Vanilla: Alister’s own project, which looks to integrate the features of the aforementioned themes, plus add layout flexibility using options (like dropdown page rearrangement), content blocks (as opposed to the rigidity of header, posts, sidebar, footer that we’ve been adhering to) and widgetising those blocks.

I was excited to hear about these themes and this concept of smart themes because I’ve been wondering for a while what is out there and how far themes have come. Obviously I’m very familiar with Thesis, but I wasn’t sure if any others had come close to that.

Pretty early on in the talk I wondered if he would mention Thesis, but I very quickly noticed that all the themes he mentioned were free ones. For that reason I asked what license those themes were under (they’re GPL) and how he hoped to release Vanilla. In the answer to those questions he actually mentioned that he’s used Thesis, so I was at least glad he was aware of the theme. We had a brief chat about Thesis later and why, apart from the GPL issue, Alister doesn’t consider Thesis to be a true base theme. I have further thoughts about it, I might write about them another time, but if you really want to know ask me about it.

I pretty much instigated a debate/discussion about GPL and premium themes and selling products dependent on WordPress. Woops! You can grab some of the Twitter background chat that happened during that by searching for license, GPL and licensing.

Harley Alexander: Versatility of the Loop

Harley Alexander talks about WP_Query (photo by Halans)

I was so excited to hear a techy/geeky talk with some practical examples! Harley is a really talented 15 year old (don’t let his age put you off, he is definitely worth hiring for WordPress work!). I think the whole room was stoked that such a young guy was doing so well and talking to us, and at the same time half (maybe a quarter of) the room was jealous that he seems to know more about WordPress at 15 than they do now! He spoke about WP_Query and query_posts, which is exactly the stuff I have been dealing with for the last week or two, so that was pretty exciting. He gave a great explanation of them and you can find the example he used on his blog, Baffle! inc.

Thanks to all the speakers!

Really, thanks to everyone who spoke. You’re all doing top notch stuff with WordPress and it was excellent to hear about all the different things folks are doing!

You can check out some of the talks from WordCamp AU on vimeo (there’s only one there right now, but more are coming). There’s also a good collection of photos on Flickr and some on Matt Mullenweg’s site.

I think this post is about long enough! Please feel free to ask about other details from the conference or about any of the jargon I might have used.

w00t! WordCamp Australia starts tomorrow. I’m not really sure what to expect, but I’m sure it’ll be great!

If I get the chance I will probably be on Twitter. Otherwise I’ll blog about it when I can.

Among others, Matt Mullenweg, Jane Wells, Sam Bauers and Aussies Jeff Waugh and Neerav Bhatt are speaking. You can check out the schedule for yourself. Word on the street is that Matt has a habit of announcing new versions and releases in his talks, so if we’re lucky we’ll get some WP 2.7 action. Also it looks like Jeff will be ripping it up on his blog with WordCamp AU info, so check him out too.

I know Kym and Andrew are going to be there. If you’re going, drop me a line or just say “G’day!”

Some of the information in this tutorial is deprecated as of Thesis 1.5. See the updated instructions Full-width headers in v1.5.

I recently ported my blog to Thesis by DIYthemes.

Thesis has excellent SEO, and with it you can choose the number of sidebars that you want and their position, you can adjust the widths of content and sidebars, and you can change fonts across the webpage… all from dropdown options in the admin area. There are a bunch of other options allowing you to change the nav menu, size of gravatars, comment count, author link, category, date and tag display, and more. If you’re not a coder you can receive assistance with custom CSS and PHP hooks on the forum.

For those reasons and a few others I am now using Thesis. The new full page framework makes it fairly easy to have full-width headers and footers. In this post is a how-to on customising your header.

Full page framework

The first step of making a full-width header and footer is to choose the Full-width framework from the Design Options page.
NB if you have done the coloured background thing with the page framework, selecting full-width will mess it up. You’ll need to rearrange your CSS a bit. The following assumes you haven’t modified much of your design yet.

Prepare header and navigation

The easiest way to swap the positions of the header and navigation is as described in the Thesis documentation, by adding code to custom_functions.php.

remove_action('thesis_hook_before_header', 'thesis_nav_menu');
add_action('thesis_hook_after_header', 'thesis_nav_menu');

Swap header and navigation

Doing that makes the header area structure,

• div#header_area
  • div.page
    • div#header
    • ul#tabs

Which basically means that div#header_area spans the full width of the page and everything else is inside that.

On the Tip’d blog Chris has created new divs, which make it easier to give the header and nav different backgrounds. If you do that with custom_functions.php I don’t think it’s possible to remove the #header_area. However, for this demonstration I’m going to do it anyway and just hide #header_area with CSS.

Place the following at the very bottom of custom_functions.php.

remove_action('thesis_hook_before_header', 'thesis_nav_menu');
remove_action('thesis_hook_header', 'thesis_default_header');

function full_width_header() { ?>
	<div id="nav_area" class="full_width">
		<div class="page">
			<?php thesis_nav_menu(); ?>
		</div>
	</div>
	<div id="title_area" class="full_width">
		<div class="page">
			<div id="header">
				<?php thesis_default_header(); ?>
			</div>
		</div>
	</div>
<?php }
add_action('thesis_hook_before_html', 'full_width_header');

This adds the nav above the title, or you can take the whole nav_area and move it below the title and before <?php }, to have the nav below the header.

Replace header with new title and navigation

Styling the header with CSS

All your CSS should go in custom.css.

Remove unwanted styles

There are a bunch of borders and related styles that we don’t necessarily want in our new header, so I’m going to remove them. I’ve done it in a specific way that should allow you to add some back in if you want to.

.custom #header_area{display:none;}

.custom #nav_area ul {border-bottom:none; border-left:none;}
	.custom #nav_area ul li {border-width:0; margin-bottom:0; padding-bottom:0; background:none;}

.custom #header {border-bottom:none;}

These styles hide the original header (unfortunately the empty div is still in the markup); remove borders, padding and margin from the nav that were mainly related to current page styles; remove the header double border.

Remove unwanted styles

Add some new styles

Now we’re set to add some backgrounds and some more space for the nav, which feels a bit squished up the top, as well as some borders, which just make things feel much more complete. Building on the previous CSS:

.custom #header_area{display:none;}

.custom #nav_area {background:#c3d9d6; padding:0.5em 0; border-bottom:1px solid #ddf;}
	.custom #nav_area ul {border-bottom:none; border-left:none;}
		.custom #nav_area ul li {border-width:0; margin-bottom:0; padding-bottom:0; background:none;}

.custom #title_area {background:#de6a61; padding:1em 0; border-bottom:1px solid #c55;}
	.custom #header {border-bottom:none;}

Background colours and borders

I like to use background images to spruce things up, then hide the title and description. In thesis you can opt not to show them, but I like to leave them in and hide them in case someone loads the page without CSS and because Google bots don’t care about CSS.

.custom #title_area {background:#de6a61; padding:1em 0 0.5em; border-bottom:1px solid #c55;}
	.custom #header {border-bottom:none; height:150px; padding-top:0; padding-bottom:0; background:url(images/header.png) center left no-repeat;}
		.custom #header #logo {display:none;}
		.custom #header #tagline {display:none;}

Title & description hidden, background image added

Coffee cup is from OpenClipart.org.

The other option is to replace the default title and description in custom_functions.php.

<div id="title_area" class="full_width">
	<div class="page">
		<div id="header">
			<p id="logo"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory') ?>/custom/images/header.png" alt="<?php bloginfo('name') ?>" /></p>
		</div>
	</div>
</div>

The process to customise your footer is similar, but even easier since there is only the one footer element, as opposed to both the title and nav bar. I’ll follow up with a post about footers in due course.

Questions?

If you have any questions, ask away! There is a forum thread so other thesis users can discuss it too.

I don’t know about you guys, but I use the search box on my site reasonably regularly. Usually to find posts I remember writing and want to point people to.

I tried to look up “copyblogger” the other day to find Personalising the Copyblogger theme, but had to go through a couple of pages of results because I’ve mentioned Copyblogger since then. Apparently WordPress gives search results in reverse chronological order, with no measure of relevance.

Then today I tried to find WordPress using Coda and Mamp by searching for “mamp”, but it took a while to find.

So I’ve just implemented a Google Custom Search Engine on my site. The results are much more useful!

Custom search results on kristarella.com

I found a post by Aleem Bawany quite useful (for the end part I made a WordPress page and used a page template to insert the search code instead of a page in the root directory). There’s also a video tutorial on CSS Tricks.

Writing posts in WordPress, I got sick of trying to remember what tags I had already created and which ones applied to the post I was writing. Maybe you know the feeling?

I searched around… it looked like the perfect plugin for the job was no longer supported. Simple Tags is also a very good plugin, which I used for a while, but I didn’t want to use quite an extensive plugin for something so small. I was using Simple Tags to add tags to my old posts, the clickable tags in the write panel were a bonus. However, I tagges my old posts for a while, and I have pluginaphobia (fear of using too many plugins that need to be updated and depend on other people for development), so I wanted to find a simpler solution.

I decided that a simple text list of the current tags was enough for me, which I achieved. My husband decided it would be so easy to make them clickable and automatically insert the tags, so he grabbed my computer and started javascripting away!

The result (after I applied a bit of styling) was this:

Screenshot of the tags section in my WP write panel

When you click on one of the tags it adds that tag to the post, just the same as if you’d typed the tag into the box and hit enter.

I would have liked to make it a small plugin, but I haven’t figured it out yet. At the moment I’ve edited one of the core files, wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php.

The code is,
<?php
$tags = get_tags(array('orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'ASC'));
echo '<p>Existing tags: ';
foreach ($tags as $tag) {
echo '<a style="margin:3px; line-height:3em; padding:3px 6px; background:#eef; border:1px solid #bbb; text-decoration:none;" href="#" onClick="addTag(\'' . $tag->name . '\'); return false" >' . $tag->name . '</a> ';
}
echo '</p>';
?>
<script type="text/javascript">
function addTag(tag) {
var elt = document.getElementById('newtag');
elt.value = tag;
tag_flush_to_text();
}
</script>

The code goes after the end of <p id="jaxtag"> (line 227, after the whole paragraph that is) and before the start of <div id="tagchecklist">.

There might be a better way to do it, but this works very nicely. Thankyou!

If you know how to make this a plugin this I would appreciate your help! Otherwise, feel free to use this code in your WP setup.

Life has been pretty crazy lately. Uni is busy and I’ve been trying to be a better friend/family member too. I’ve been doing a bit of CSS (restyling Thesis) for some mental escape and I’ve started writing a couple of posts, but haven’t finished and polished them yet.

So, this is a bit of an update on my life through the lens of my phone’s camera. The Sony Ericsson S500i has a 2MP camera, but the photos tend to come out with a lot of noise and a sort of linen-like texture on them. Every now and again you get a good one though (there’s only one or two of those in this lot).

I’ve found myself spending too much time at uni after dark. The walkway is quite pretty when it’s lit up, but I’d prefer to be at home eating dinner!

Walkway at UNSW, Kensington

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

This previously nameless cafe is now called Biblio, and it has one of the ugliest logos ever.

Biblio cafe, with horrible logo

We went to a birthday party recently where the theme was rainbow. This is one of my favourite phone photos.

Nat decorating Gerry's hair

Static electricity + Balloons = boy fun

My hair has gone curly

I got my hair cut and now it’s doing some curly thing. I kinda like it.

We went to a wedding recently and there were a few guys that work for Google there. One of them is my husband. Apart from Google offices it’s the most Google employees I’ve seen in one place. :P

I’m not really into this whole tights thing. There’s no way I could pull it off. I think those that do must be quite confident in their dress code.

Tights are the latest fashion :S

Central station can be reasonably pleasant as the sun sets too, but again, I’d rather be home!

Central Station, Sydney

I’m hanging out at my parent’s place a little bit this weekend. so not online as much. You can catch me during the week on Twitter if you like. :grin:

Ooh, I also wrote this post using Google Chrome! Subtle, yet spiffy things include the loading bar at the bottom left, which disappears when the page is loaded (and appears when you hover one links etc), and the home page which shows you your most recent/popular websites. I like the simplicity. Although, you can’t set the font to render with anti-aliasing so the font rendering is a little dodgy.
Also, for those who keep whinging about how it doesn’t have addons and they can’t live without Firebug, right click on the page and select Inspect Element. It doesn’t edit the page yet, but I’m sure it will be able to soon.