rickg17

“some people also want it so newly added lists automatically appear without having to go into the plugin interface and specifically enable each new list.”

OK, now that’s a use case I’d not thought of.

Here’s the issue I’m WAS having though – No combination of the various options lets me show just my active lists and hide test lists. However, 3.01 seems to fix this (or I had a plug issue). Odd, but it works now. And thanks for expanding on the use case above – I’d not considered that and, though it’s not the way I’d every run things… it’s valid.

EDIT: Whoops, spoke too soon. Here’s what happened. I had, for other reasons, started with a fresh database. When I initially installed this plugin I went into the widget settings and hid the 2 test lists. This produced exactly what I wanted. However, I thought “Geee, I should unhide the main test list so we can test out this plugin without affecting the main lists” so i went back into the widget settings and UNchecked the main test list under the Hide section. Annnd… the test list doesn’t show. It’s as if the initial settings are recorded just fine, but updating them doesn’t affect anything. Odd….

katz,

One reason I didn’t reply was James’ tone.

The fact is, the UI clearly implies you can control list hiding and showing separately, inline comments notwithstanding – the presence of both sets of controls is confusing. You guys can say “well you just don’t get it” and write us off or you can take this as feedback that your UI isn’t clear and endeavor to make it more clear. Look, anytime you need to explain your UI in inline comments, it’s a good indication that the UI isn’t clear.

As I said above, I’d simply have one set of controls and, if a list is checked, it’s shown. If it’s not checked it isn’t. This is not (at the UI level) rocket science. However, right now, the plugin is useless with WP 3.0x since all of the lists show up regardless of the UI choices I make.

The image here https://img444.imageshack.us/img444/1348/screenshot20100608at453.png shows settings that I’d expect to show the first two lists and hide the last two, but all four lists show up in both 2.92 or 3.0. In fact all 4 lists show up regardless of the choices I make here (i’m using the widget).

James,

I’ll try this in 2.92 and let you know what I find.

As for the UI, your current UI allows me to define logically impossible settings – Under the Show section “List A” can be checked, but the Hide section “List A” can also be checked. That says to me that I’m telling the plugin to show the list and then to hide it – that’s an unresolvable conflict. Should the list be shown or not?

To resolve this, in each section (register and widget) I’d simply have a Show These Lists group box with checkboxes for all of the lists from their account. If someone wants to show a list, they check it. Unchecked lists don’t show up. Note I’m NOT saying they should be forced to have the same settings on the Register section and the Widget section. Rather, I’m saying that the Show/HIde UI within each needs to be streamlined and made so that it’s more intuitive. People should be able to check lists that they want to show up and those do, unchecked ones don’t. They should not have to understand the programming logic to get that they shouldn’t setup certain situations.

Note that the flip of what I reccomend also works – ask people which lists they want to *hide*.

Nope. I’ve tried both combinations (leave the Hide list all unchecked and checking the lists I wanted to show, leaving others unchecked ) and they all showed up. I’ve checked (under Show) the ones to show and checked (under Hide) the ones to hide. No luck (I’m using the widget).

I’ll play with this more, but this might be a compatibility with 3.0 thing and, frankly this isn’t that hard to do a UI for – give people a selection of which lists to show. By definition, if I don’t check a list it’s hidden. There’s not any need to have separate hide/show controls, especially since you can define contradictory settings (check both Show and Hide for a given list).

Related conceptually, but a different issue is that I would NOT allow people to delete lists on Constant Contact from the plugin, especially since there’s no “Are you Sure?” You’re destroying data in a pretty cavalier way and it would be very easy to think that’s how you can not show lists.

A suggestion and a question.

First, I’d just collapse the show/hide into one set of settings – checked things show, unchecked, they don’t.

the question: Does this mean there’s no way to hide lists? If so, that really means I can’t use the plugin at all, sadly.

Be careful about YSlow. It’s a great tool, but has often misdetected whether my pages are being served gzipped or not for example. I look at this plugin as icing on the cake… it’s not a bandaid to magically fix a poorly optimized site, but it’s a way to eke out a bit more performance. Personally I use Pingdom’s response time reports to see what the site’s doing…

More info. I nuked the imported database and let WP do a clean install. Created 2 pages, linked one to the ABout page…. same thing.

Sigh. Never mind… this was (and is) an issue with permalinks on the dev box. And yes, I have mod-rewrite on… but it’s not a NextGEN issue at all.

You can either move everything in the /wordpress directory up one level or you can use virtual hosts if your webserver supports this. In essence, you map a subdirectory (/wordpress in your case) to a domain name. So, for example, if you have myserver.com and want your blog at blog.myserver.com, you’d use a virtual host setting. you can also map a completely difference domain to the folder, so th at if you have mypersonaldomain.com and mybizdomain.com you can have each served from separate subdirectories.
The details are server dependent – what server do you use?

Sorry, delete was a bad example. But the point is that I can’t toggle these visibility, mass assign links, etc. in a default WP 1.2 install. Is this all handled in the database? I was thinking a permissions issue, but if its db driven, file permissions should not make any difference