I love that WordPress is all about the decisions over options mantra, but that sometimes means some users get stuck with stuff they don’t want. I figured there’s probably plenty of folks who aren’t that interested in post formats, so I made a quick plugin to disable the post format UI being introduced in WordPress 3.6.

You can grab a copy from the plugin page on Theme Hybrid or from WordPress.org.

What does the plugin do, exactly?

If you haven’t been keeping up with WordPress 3.6 development, you’re in for a treat. WordPress is finally doing something about those ambiguous post formats. From now on, all WordPress installs will support all post formats out of the box. They’ve done some cool UI work on the edit post screen in the admin to make post formats much more usable for the average user.

The following is a screenshot of what this looks like.

This plugin simply disables this new UI and its functionality for people who have no need for post formats.

But, let’s face it. WordPress’ admin is cluttered and complicated for many people. It’s a miracle that the folks who work on it have been able to keep it together all this time.

I have a roommate who uses WordPress to run his blog. However, I have a part-time job simply teaching him how to use it. And, it’s been three years since I first set him up. He’s not the brightest of fellows, but when I envision what WordPress should be like, I imagine WordPress.org featuring a picture of him with his testimonial — So easy, a hick from Alabama can use it!

Over the past few years, WordPress has taken on a lot of new features. However, the downside to adding new features is that you must squeeze them in alongside the existing features. The new features are nice, but the WordPress admin has put on a few pounds. It’s time to trim the fat.

The great thing about WordPress is that you can change something when you don’t like it. You can take steps to unclutter the edit post screen. You can build a custom color scheme to make your admin prettier. Or, you can build a full-blown admin theme.

Lately, there’s been a rising trend toward a simpler admin. Admin themes might just be one part of the equation to getting there.

Why admin themes?

Because they’re cool.

When developers create something new, it’s generally to solve a problem. Admin themes can solve the following.

• Give users more options for what their WordPress admins can look like. Wouldn’t it be awesome if theme developers were also releasing custom admin themes to go along with their regular themes?
• Improve the WordPress UI. With more options available, it will get more people involved in the core WordPress UI. It will also present ideas to the UI team that maybe they haven’t thought of.

With that in mind, let me introduce you to a new admin theme.

DevPress Dashboard

Over the past month or so, I’ve had a chance to talk with Tung Do about WordPress admin themes. I’ve also been a test dummy for the past week while he perfected an awesome plugin that reshaped everything about the WordPress admin.

This is one of the most beautifully-designed admin themes I’ve seen in a long time. It makes the clutter of the admin seem much more freeing. I don’t know if it was just refreshing to see something new or if it’s just that damn nice, but I’m a fan.

The following is a screenshot of the “Dashboard” screen of the DevPress Dashboard plugin’s default design. You can view more screenshots on the plugin’s page.

The only thing I might see that could keep this plugin from gaining traction is that you must be a member of DevPress to access it. I’d much rather see a default plugin + theme combo for free with additional commercial designs. Even still, the plugin alone is worth the price of membership at DevPress.

Shameless self-promotion: DevPress themes are built off my Hybrid Core theme framework, so you’d be getting an awesome deal by joining the site.

Where does WordPress go from here?

For others to build beautiful admin themes, WordPress has a little shaping up to do.

First and foremost, inline styles halfway down the admin pages need to be moved into an external stylesheet where possible. It’s extremely tough trying to write custom CSS when you’re hitting roadblocks like inline styles.

Another thing we need as plugin developers is even easier ways to build stuff in the admin. The better tools we have to create things in a standardized fashion, the easier it is to style these things. The goal should be to standardize as much as possible.

Take a look at how easy it is to build theme customizer options. That’s straight up theme developer crack. I’ll take more of that, please.

Stop building custom-designed admin screens

Theme and plugin developers, please start using the tools available to you. I have yet to figure out what’s so hard about using the built-in Settings API. If you follow the rules, the rest of us can do some truly awesome stuff.

For theme developers, everything you need is there. I’ve never seen a theme settings screen that required anything more than what’s available via the Settings API. If it does, I’m 99.9% sure that you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing in a theme. Besides, who wants to build theme options pages anymore now that we have the theme customizer?

For plugin developers, there are situations where you need more robust admin screens. Gravity Forms immediately comes to mind. However, for the vast majority, what you need is built in.

If you have a scenario that core doesn’t handle well, propose it on WordPress Trac. Submit a patch. Get involved.

More admin themes

I’d love to see more WordPress admin themes in the future, but it might be a brutal slugfest with non-standard plugins/themes and WordPress itself. Although, I believe WordPress core will eventually get there.

If you’re interested in developing admin themes, hop over to the Admin Themes repository on GitHub. It’s a little project I’m building to make it easy to build and use custom admin themes. It’s in the extremely early stages, so don’t expect much yet.

And, if you’re interested in getting involved in the WordPress UI, head over the the UI blog and see what you can do to help.

I want a special page on my site that lists posts from only one category. I know I need to create a custom page template for this, but how do I make it load just the posts from my category?

I don’t get asked this too often, but when it does come around, it usually gets asked multiple times in the same week for some reason. The problem is that you don’t have to write any kind of code or create a custom page template. WordPress has already created the page for you. This is called a “category archive.”

WordPress actually creates all kinds of archives. You have taxonomy term archives, author archives, time-/date-based archives, and the potential for many more. So, sometimes these pages already exist and you’re just not aware of them.

How to show the category archive in a menu

Most folks are concerned with adding the category archive to their menu so their visitors can easily find the page. We’re so used to thinking of pages being in the menu that we don’t think of adding other items. In the past, this was pretty much the only choice available without writing some code. However, WordPress’ nav menus system takes care of that.

To add a category archive to one of your menus, go to “Appearance > Menus” in the WordPress admin. Look for the section labeled “Categories.” Then, select the categories you want and add them to your menu.

The following screenshot illustrates what this looks like.

Nav menu with category

Altering the output of the category archive

Some users still want this page to display different data than the other archive-type pages for their special category. That’s easily doable.

To do this, you can create a category-$slug.php template where $slug is your category slug. Within that file, you can create anything you want. It’ll overwrite the template your theme normally uses to display category archives.

Keep in mind that many themes do things differently when it comes to templates, so get in touch with your theme author if you need help with this.

If you’re using any of my themes or themes built off Hybrid Core, the template name should be taxonomy-category-$slug.php.

In general, this is great. For multi-author sites, it allows you to look at a specific author’s posts. However, the author archive is pointless for single-author sites like my blog here because it’s no different than the regular blog/home/posts page.

This tutorial will teach you a few techniques for dealing with this. Most of the code samples in this tutorial should go into a custom functions plugin.

Point the URL to your “about” page

I like this option. Many sites have an “about” or “about me” page. This would be far more useful than another archive listing the same posts listed in your regular posts archive.

The following code will handle that scenario. Just replace about with the slug of the page you want to point to on your site.

add_filter( 'author_link', 'my_author_link' );

function my_author_link() {
	return home_url( 'about' );
}

If you have multiple authors but still want to do this, you can check for the user ID first. Just change the 100 to the ID of the user you want to use this technique for.

add_filter( 'author_link', 'my_multi_author_link', 10, 2 );

function my_multi_author_link( $url, $user_id ) {

	if ( 100 === $user_id )
		return home_url( 'about' );

	return $url;
}

Redirect your author archive

Another technique is to redirect your author archive to the page of your choosing. This is a good option if you don’t want anyone to directly access your author archive at all. The previous technique merely changed the public-facing links to the archive.

The following code will redirect any attempt to access an author archive to your “about” page. You can use 301 for a permanent redirect or leave it at 302 for a temporary redirect.

add_action( 'template_redirect', 'my_redirect_author_archive' );

function my_redirect_author_archive() {

	if ( is_author() ) {
		wp_redirect( home_url( 'about' ), 302 );
		exit;
	}
}

You can also do this for specific author archives by changing is_author() to is_author( $author ). For more information on the is_author() function, check out the function’s page in the WordPress Codex.

What can theme authors do?

If you’re a theme author, you can make checks for single-author vs. multi-author blogs. WordPress has this nifty conditional function called is_multi_author(). It allows you to check whether multiple users have written posts. I sometimes use it when adding an author profile box after single views of posts.

A simple option for displaying an author’s posts URL only if there are multiple authors is the following. It will display the author name if it’s not a multi-author blog.

<?php is_multi_author() ? the_author_posts_link() : the_author(); ?>

Of course, there are other things you can show/hide depending on your theme. The above just illustrates the use of the is_multi_author() function.

So, you’re telling me that you — the guy who’s been drilling it into my head to not add theme shortcodes — that it might now be okay?

Well, yes. Technically, I’ve always been okay with themes adding shortcodes as long as those shortcodes are not intended to be used in the post content.

Shortcodes can be used for any number of purposes. Generally speaking, developers create shortcodes to be used in the post content. For this reason alone, shortcodes belong in a plugin. However, if you’re creating a shortcode to be used in other places where data portability is not an issue, go wild.

Here’s a few examples of what I consider exceptions to the rule:

• Shortcodes for use in theme templates.
• Shortcodes for use in theme settings, such as the footer text.
• Shortcodes for use in widgets (this is probably a bit of a gray area to some).

The problem is that users can still use these shortcodes in the post content even if it wasn’t your intention to allow them to do so. This discussion came up in the comments on the proposed WordPress 3.5 theme guideline revisions. This tutorial will show you how to avoid that scenario.

Adding shortcodes

I’m going to assume you’re already familiar with the process of adding shortcodes using WordPress’ add_shortcode() function, so I won’t cover that.

The following is an example of a few theme-defined shortcodes and how they should be set up.

add_action( 'init', 'my_add_shortcodes' );

function my_add_shortcodes() {

	add_shortcode( 'shortcode_1', 'my_shortcode_1' );
	add_shortcode( 'shortcode_2', 'my_shortcode_2' );
	add_shortcode( 'shortcode_3', 'my_shortcode_3' );
}

This is just to give you a base to work with for the remainder of this tutorial. You can set up your own shortcodes however you like.

Not allowing theme shortcodes in the post content

We don’t want our shortcodes to be used at all in the post content. The best option here is to simply remove them when the the_content filter hook is called. WordPress makes this extremely easy with the remove_shortcode() function.

The following code will remove the three shortcodes we added earlier.

add_filter( 'the_content', 'my_post_content_remove_shortcodes', 0 );

function my_post_content_remove_shortcodes( $content ) {

	/* Create an array of all the shortcode tags. */
	$shortcode_tags = array(
		'shortcode_1',
		'shortcode_2',
		'shortcode_3'
	);

	/* Loop through the shortcodes and remove them. */
	foreach ( $shortcode_tags as $shortcode_tag )
		remove_shortcode( $shortcode_tag );

	/* Return the post content. */
	return $content;
}

Wait! Won’t that permanently remove the shortcodes? Yes, it will. Therefore, you must add them back so they can be used outside of the_content. The following code does just that.

add_filter( 'the_content', 'my_post_content_add_shortcodes', 99 );

function my_post_content_add_shortcodes( $content ) {

	/* Add the original shortcodes back. */
	my_add_shortcodes();

	/* Return the post content. */
	return $content;
}

Thoughts? Other solutions?

I agree that this seems like a bit of a hack, but it’s the best option I’ve found thus far and doesn’t take much code. I’m open to suggestions on better methods.

The great news is that you don’t have to worry about your users messing up their content by using shortcodes that you didn’t intend for use in the post content. They’ll know upon any attempts to do so that it simply won’t work.