“Page Columnist” - Posts and Pages at Column Layout
codestyling | 13. June 2009 | 18:34
Some time ago i was asked by a friend of mine if there is no easy solution to get pages edited at column layout without a knownledge about HTML and CSS simply at the editors. It should be a little bit flexible und easy to use. The upcomming solution was the plugin “Page Columnist”.
Unfortunately the plugin did only support static pages of WordPress. Furthermore i was astonished during release of WordPress 2.8 that the plugin didn’t produce any longer columns but nevertheless did some it’s normal work as internally designed for.
After some incomming urgent user requests about that erroneous behavoir i did analyze the code to find out, what is different in comparison to previous version. I did catch the reason at the WordPress core files again. The core team did change again the calling sequence (order) of processing WordPress Hooks. Doing so the work of my plugin has been started in front of the ordinary WordPress content handling. That’s why the plugin did already it’s work as intended but senceless because WordPress reverts it afterwards.
After this discovery and my changes to meet now the new behavoir too, the next shock raised. WordPress 2.8 now introduces jQuery 1.3.2 and jQuery UI 1.7.2 (previous version is bundled with 1.2.6 and 1.5.2) and this crashed the onpage Preview Assistance immediatly and it was not longer working. As first emergency fix i wrote the version 1.3.0, which was actualized at Repository 14 hours after WordPress 2.8 has been released. This emergency fix has got an ugly jQuery switch with 2 different javascript related to the WordPress version runing because the time to fix it would be more expensive.
I was not glad about this javascript duplication and futhermore a lot of request from user arrived like: “Why does the plugin only support pages but not posts ?” i decide to rework some code to allow the columnization behavoir also at single posts, because the plugin could do that too.
The Plugin Description shows you, how you can use the plugin at your own Blogs. I also wrote a Demonstration Page in addition to give you a first impression, what the plugin can do for you. It may be more realistic than the screenshots already available.
