Baltic Amber Admin Themes & Schemes Now With a Colour Picker

May 5th • No Comments • Under: WordPress • Tags: plugin, WordPress

Latest version of Baltic Amber Themes & Schemes plugin now includes a very simple and easy to use colour picker so that you never have to search for those hexadecimal values again. In the ‘Baltic Amber Colour Settings’ page simply click on the color input field and a color wheel will pop up offering you the whole spectrum of colours to choose from.

If you are upgrading from one of the previous versions of this plugin, please don’t forget to clear your browser cache by simply refreshing the settings page.

The new feature for selecting scheme colours is based on the amazing work of Steven Wittens who built Farbtastic color picker as a plugin for jQuery javascript library.

Baltic Amber Themes & Schemes for Your WordPress 2.5 Administration Panel

April 20th • 84 Comments • Under: WordPress • Tags: plugin, WordPress

Update: now you have the possibility to specify your own admin colour scheme leaving the layout exactly like it is in WordPress 2.5 by default.

Matt Mullenweg recently asked if anybody has taken advantage of the new admin colour scheme switcher in WordPress 2.5, and the short answer is yes and no. There is the Fluency theme by Dean J. Robinson, which is more like a complete redesign of the administration panel.

Therefore I made the Baltic Amber Admin Themes & Schemes, which allow you:

• to create your own colour scheme by specifying only two base colours,
• to have the theme colours change randomly every time you reload the page, or at any time interval you choose,
• to use one of the administration themes which slightly alter/improve the positioning of different administration panel elements, like the main navigation, dashboard information and the plugin listing. There are eight basic colour options available or you can specify your own base colours by choosing ‘My Colour Theme’, or use the random colour generator.
• to place Tag and Category selection in two columns right after the text editor in the ‘Write Post’ panel. This option can be enabled for every admin theme, including the default ones.

Baltic Amber admin themes also improve the scanability of the Plugin Management screen by replacing the darker background colour for the activated plugins with a green ribbon on the side. Read more »

WordPress Plugin of the Year: PHP Speedy

March 28th • 2 Comments • Under: WordPress • Tags: plugin, WordPress

Although we are not even close to the middle of 2008, I can honestly say that PHP Speedy (designed and developed by Leon Chevalier) is the plugin which the WordPress community has been waiting for since the very first day.

Download it, install it and watch your blog load faster than you have ever imagined (even with that huge chunk of other plugins you have installed). Fantastic job, Leon!

Suggestions for writing flexible and usable plugin

February 5th • 4 Comments • Under: Sidenotes • Tags: development, plugin, WordPress

After the release of Custom Function Widgets plugin I also wrote about it in the WordPress support forum. Fellow forum contributor Otto42 (author of a very similar plugin: ExecPHP) had very interesting things to say regarding the plugin development in general. Really worth reading and discussing.

WordPress Plugin: Custom Function Widgets

February 4th • 18 Comments • Under: WordPress • Tags: blogging, plugin, WordPress

Many of the WordPress plugin authors don’t offer widgets, but only raw PHP functions (or hooks) which you have to insert into the theme’s template files. As the number of functions increases it becomes harder to manage it all, especially if you decide to uninstall some of them or add new ones.

It is especially inconvenient for those who are not so savvy, or don’t want to edit theme files. Moreover, if one decides to change the theme, the edits have to be repeated all over again.

Therefore, I made this Custom Function Widget plugin which allows you to create sidebar widgets without ever touching the theme’s files and use these widgets in any theme you like. Read more »