nateomedia

WP-SNAP! has once again been updated! I’ve completely changed how posts are displayed in this version, pushing that duty back onto the WordPress Loop. WP-SNAP! version 0.6 can be found here:

WP-SNAP! v0.6

Enjoy!

WP-SNAP! has had a couple more minor updates, bringing us to version 0.5.4.

WP-SNAP! v0.5.4

Lorelle was also kind enough to do a little review my plugin, you can take a look at that here.

WP-SNAP! has been updated (finally) to version 0.5.2. Just trying to kill a few bugs for now, but if you’re using this plugin you probably want to try this version.

WP-SNAP! v0.5.2

WP-SNAP! has been updated to version 0.5. It is now possible for the user to define words (such as “the” or “an”) to be ignored when alphabetizing posts.

WP-SNAP! v0.5

I’ve update WP-SNAP! to version 0.4. It no longer chokes on post entries beginning with non-alphanumeric characters (i.e., a quotation mark, ampersand, percentage symbol, etc.).

WP-SNAP! v0.4

Give the plugin a shot in 1.5. It might work. I just haven’t tested it in that environment. But there’s nothing that the plugin could really do to damage your database or anything — either it will work or it won’t.

Use my plugin? The only difference between it and Choking on Popcorn is that it has an “all” and “#” category — and I’ve already noted to put something like that in the next version.

Try my plugin and, if you cannot figure out how to get it to work, leave a comment on my web page noting the specific steps that you performed and I’ll help you get it to work.

I fixed a bug with the navigational menu and have updated WP-SNAP! to version 0.3.1.

WP-SNAP! v0.3.1

I’ve updated WP-SNAP! to version 0.3. I’ve improved how the plugin handles post excerpts. Now, if the plugin finds that a post’s excerpt field is empty, it will create an excerpt from the post content. The length of the excerpt can be controlled from the plugin’s options menu in the admin interface.

WP-SNAP! v0.3

The biggest frustration I’ve had with WordPress is the inability to remove the base category from the url permalink structure. The irony is that I’m very interested in using WordPress as a CMS, and its WordPress Pages — a CMS “feature” — that prevents the use of a logical permalink structure. Kill Pages and force me to create a category for static content any day over this mess.

If one mixes categories with pages, one comes up with a really illogical url scheme:

www.site.com/category/typing/
www.site.com/about/
www.site.com/category/forsale/
www.site.com/intro/

Huh?

To make matters worse, depending on the browser (I’ve seen it work sometimes), going to www.site.com/category/ will result in a 404. Going to www.site.com/typing may or may not also result in a 404 (again, I’ve seen it work occasionally).

It seems to me that there is a simple solution. Allow the user to turn off Pages. Without pages, there should be no need for the base category prefix. Those that like Pages can continue to use them, those that don’t can ditch them.

I actually tried to switch to Textpattern over this issue. But Textpattern is so backwards in so many other ways that it just wasn’t worth the heartache. WordPress is great software, but I think removing Pages would make it 1000 times better.

There should be no need to change the code in the plugin to get the results you desire. It can all be done through css. To remove the numbers:

#navigation ol.snap_nav li {
list-style: none;
}

I suggest that you get yourself a book on css — Cascading Style Sheets 2.0: Programmer’s Reference by Eric A. Meyer would be a great place to start.

I’m glad you like it. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for making it better.

If you want them to display vertically in a box as you’ve shown, you’ll want to add something like this to your style.css file:

#divname ol.snap_nav {
padding: 8px 8px 5px 8px
border: 1px solid #000;
text-align: center;
}

#divname ol.snap_nav li {
margin-bottom: 3px;
display: block;
}

I hear… crickets chirping. Well, I hope someone is finding this plugin useful.

I have two thoughts for additional features I could implement, but it would be nice to know someone was interested:

1. (Easy) An option to include the children of the current category in the displayed results.
2. (Harder) An option to include a numerical paging system at the bottom of the displayed results and the ability to set a hard limit of the number of posts displayed at a time. For instance, say there are 28 posts with titles starting with the letter “B” — one could set a hard limit on displaying 10 post title results per page, with a numerical menu at the bottom something like this:

< Previous ... 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 ... Next >

The last page of “B” results might even include 2 “C” results, and clicking on the next page might finished the “C”s and start the “D”s. Etc.

Hopefully I’m making some sense. Any interest in something like that?

Hot on the heels of WP-SNAP! v0.1 comes version 0.2. Surprisingly, this is not a bug fix, but a feature enhancement. After reading this thread, I realized that I could very easily modify my plugin to allow you to pre-select the category to be displayed. While not very useful (and perhaps confusing to users) on a Category page, it could be very useful on a Page… uh, page.

In new version 0.2, you can pass a category to WP-SNAP! thusly:

<?php echo wp-snap('0'); ?>

Grab it here: https://www.nateomedia.com/wordpress/wp-snap