Easily the single biggest draw to using WordPress (apart from the price of course, which is priceless didn't you know), is without a shadow of a doubt the actual community that has gathered around these handful of PHP files. I know I couldn't do a slew of things as easily as I'm doing them now without the community. Whenever I want to do something, someone's already taken the time and done it for me.
So you can imagine my shock when I've actually come up with a couple of things that I'd like to do that unfortunately haven't been touched upon, or at least I'm completely ignorant about. If they do exist and you know about them, please tell me, you'd make my day for sure, maybe even my week :)
RSS Control
WordPress provides you with the native ability to provide an rss feed for any category you choose, by adding a /feed at the end of the link (you can read a much more indepth explaination on Phu's site). Very nice, very simple. Unfortunately this gives the user absolutely no indication of what feed they're actually subscribing to, unless of course they decides to have a wad through the damn url, and then they've got to change the name manually in the aggregator to distinguish between the several feeds from the same site. Ideally what I'd like is a plugin (don't like hacks very much as they're usually broken when you upgrade and that's a complete shag) that helps me control the feeds themselves. Lets me give different category feeds a different name. Download Posts
Now I know Chris is working on this, but he seems to be having a wee bit of trouble implementing the thing. So I'm going to put it out there, maybe someone's got the answer because they've done it already etc. What I'm looking for here is a simple plugin that will download my posts and all associated information (not so bothered about comments although that would be an excellent feature), in a specific order, for a specific period of time. The alternative is to make a theme and download that, which I did, but it doesn't have the level of control a plugin has, and also it would have to be used with a plugin such as the Custom Query String plugin (which isn't working 100% for me for some reason) to control how the order the posts are shown.
Sorry Khaled, can you expand on what you're after with the "Download Posts" plugin? How do you want it to work?
Basically I'm trying to get my posts printed out in a book for me to keep. What I'm looking for is a plugin that will effectively look at my database and extract the posts, with the relevant information, that's time, date, title, number of comments and if it's possible the comments themselves.
I would ideally like to have the capability to decide a time period for which I download these posts, i.e from jan 2004 till jan 2005 or whatever.
The final outcome could be as simple as a text file, without any other information, or (preferably) an HTML file with all the links in tact...guess I should have included that last part.
I've also started a "WordPress Wishlist":http://binarybonsai.com/wordpress/wordpress-wishlist/, though so far only search is on it. But oh boy, search is ON it! The current WP search function is _horrible!_
I'd like to add two things:
* Per post ping settings.
A simple checkbox on the Writepage: ping or not.
(Maybe I should send this to shuttle?)
* Better text rendering engine. Textile just never works properly with Wordpress. Someone wrote in detail about this, but I don't remember where. Suffice to say it could be better.
Joen, think you can find that Textile article?
YES! Found it!
That's the most googling I've done in a while. Took quite some time to find it. Turns out it was about Markdown, not Textile. All the same, Textile suffers from similar problems (they're even sharing syntax at times).
(By the way, this is the second post attempt, Spaminator blocked my first!)
You serious, I've still got that on? I'll go sort it out. Let me read that article (I've got to admitt I'm not a textiles user, well not really, so maybe I should give it a little looksee...
I'm serious, I simply pasted the link in, without wrapping it in an a tag, and apparently spaminator disliked that.
Re-read parts of the article. As a summation, the problem with the text engine is that there are several filters that run sequentally. These sequental filters slowly whittle away at the original syntax, causing an end result unlike the actual syntax. I don't exactly know how this can be changed or improved, but I know that Movable Type is often praised for it's excellent text handling. Also, I remember when running Movable Type, curly quotes and em-dashes were always handled very well.
Some of the problems I am currently experiencing with the best textile plugin currently available for WP (Textile 2 Improved 2.08):
* Em dashes aren't happening (-- should become —)
* Sometimes Textile (or WP?) removes or adds an extra paragraph, or sometimes a br tag followed by a closing p, when only the closing p should be there.
* Sometimes there are conflicts with the tag, which again results in extra br tags.
* The classic example of several quotes and curly quotes. Sometimes the quotes will simply turn the wrong way.
Oh, and I completely steer clear of "h3. header 3" and the likes. In general, everything that is preceeded by the «!--more--» tag is bound to bork.
Sorry for the double post, Khaled. Feel free to edit, merge or whatever. Oh, and in my preceding post, there should have been a «!--more--» in the second last paragraph between "the" and "tag" :)
I totally agree with Number one. Number two would be neat, but not so much something I'd use.
Something I would love to see at some point in WP (though admittedly, I can't see it happening) is a theme editor for the non-php fiend. Maybe in a nice Ajaxy-type way.
Meaning, you would open up the screen and see the theme as it would look normally. You would have the ability to change text in the sidebar, insert images, change width and placement of sidebar and other elements, etc...Then you could save it as a php theme.
Just a dream, I know, but maybe someday something like this will be realistic. It would really make WP open to new users that are not handy with code.
I've started using Textile for pretty much everything I write on my blog. But yeah, there are some annoyances in there, in particular the emdash and odd p and br problems.