DeanLogic

Well, I figured out how not to only add buttons for my WP People plugin but to have it popup with a window to select from the WP People list and then select a person and have it insert back into the Page or Post. And, I got it to work with both the tinyMCE (the pretty WYSIWYG editor) and basic editors. Yippee!!! Of course, IE is a piece of junk, so it doesn’t work 100% with IE. A couple of errors appear when it loads the list popup, but you can just click through those and the insert still works.

On top of getting this to work, I reduce the number of pages used in another example I saw. In the other examples, it looked like they had to create one popup page for each of the editors. I managed to make it work with just one page (i.e. regardless of what IE says). I also eliminated some other side files that the examples were using. However, my plugin is much simpler and didn’t need a lot of other things.

Of course, as I sit here writing this, I realize that I didn’t restrict the WP People list to the owner, so I guess I’ll be making a quick change. A geek’s work is never done.

After looking over a few examples of adding a button to the Post/Page editor, I found Deanna Schneider’s blog about adding a button. And, I got it to work! Woo hoo!

Through her example, I was able to figure out how to create a page that would be called when the button is clicked. The popup page lists the WP People available, with their picture, an abbreviated version of their bio, name and nickname. Next to each person is a button to insert them into the post. When you click the button, the full name of the person is inserted into the post. Simple as that.

Now, I just have to figure it out on the basic Page/Post editor. I figured out how to add the button.

However, I’ve only been able to pull up a separate window with the list in it. This really doesn’t work for what I want to do. I want to have the popup that allows me to interact with the page that pulled it up. I’m sure it’s something simple and hopefully I’ll figure it out soon and then I’ll be done with my WP People upgrade.

Well, in an attempt to add a button to the editor menu so that a user could easily add people from the WP People list to a post, I managed to go through and update the code to make it compatible (upgradeable) with earlier version of WP People, just in case. I also figured out how to copy WP People from the table to the XFN database. The biggest annoyance was adding the category after inserting the record in the to table. But, after figuring it out, I trucked along and made it possible to edit, add, and delete WP People XFN Links. Woo hoo!! So now, if someone adds uses WP People, they can easily edit the information without going to the Links page and find their WP People.

The next step is to finally add that button to the Post and Page editor. Hopefully it won’t take me too long to figure it out. I will later have to add some error checking to the Add/Edit forms and get the Delete button to popup an alert again, but that’s not really too important at the moment.

Hopefully, when I get this button part done, I might get back to either doing more working on the Meetup Organizer Tool or adding a FAQ plugin to WordPress. Most of the FAQ plugins I see are for overall FAQs, but I want to make one that can be link to a particular item or page. This way, I can write a different FAQ for each plugin, widget, or application that I do.

I was trying to add a FAQ to my blog for the Meetup Organizer Tool I am working on and then I got side tracked updating my WP People Plugin.

The WP People Plugin basically takes the Name value from Links added to the blog and replaces it with a nick name and a link to more information about the person. I originally had created a database table to hold the people and an admin screen to add, edit and delete. Then I saw the XFN option in WordPress and figured it would be much easier to use that information.

Apparently I tried to do this update a while back and stopped development on it. Well, now I am close to being done and I will store it on the WordPress Plugin Database. Woo hoo!!

Of course, I need to get back to what I originally planned, taking a FAQ script and making it a Page plugin for WordPress.