Tonight I worked out how to have a different icon in the dashboard when the menu is active, inactive, or hovered over. This allows me to use a different color icon when active than when hovering over the menu or making it active. The funny looking icon that was displayed when the menu is active now looks correct.
This weekend I decided to start working on the Dashboard Menu. WordPress 2.7 changes the Dashboard quite a bit and the way I had done the menus previously still worked but wasn’t very intuitive. As familiar as I am with the plugin, I still found myself hunting for several of the items.
I used to have a top level Swim Team menu but had removed it because it didn’t play nicely with some of the Admin Menu plugins. 2.7 cleans up that problem (I think) and I have added the top level menu back in. 2.7 also supports adding a custom icon for top level menus. I found a couple of SVG images on Wikimedia Commons that I will probably use with the plugin.
Right now I am using the diver as the icon for the plugin and it looks pretty good!
There is a pretty good write up on how to Top Level Menus and how to Add Icons to the Dashboard on WpEngineer.com. I found one other explanation but this one is easier to follow. I had posed a question on the Wp-Hackers mailing list about how big the icon should be but still don’t have an answer.
There has been a lot of discussion on the wp-hackers mailing list about the upcomming 2.7 release of WordPress and the change to the Admin Menus. I decided to load it up and see how it affected this plugin. For the most part everything works the way it is supposed to. I ran into a few oddities which were errors that weren’t obvious until I ran it with 2.7 but everthing worked as it is supposed to.
The big change is the location (left side bar) of the new admin menus and the change in terminology. The change in terminology takes some getting used to. We’ll see if it stays as it currently is in the development build or if it changes. From the Admin perspective, the presentation is different but not markedly so. From the user perspective, the Swim Team menu doesn’t show up and I am not sure why yet.
I committed a whole bunch of changes I had to make as a result of debugging the 2.7 presentation issues. So far, all of the changes work as they should on 2.5.1, 2.6 and 2.6.1 as well. Switching releases (2.6.1 and 2.7) and platforms (Windows and Linux) during development is proving to be a useful thing as it flushes out stuff earlier in the process.
As the Swim Team Dashboard menu has grown I have been thinking of changing how I present the various choices to both the Admin as well as a Subscriber. While I have thought about it from time to time, I haven’t done anything about it. I was recently looking for something in the WordPress plugin directory and found something called Lighter Menus.
Lighter Menus changes the Dashboard menus into a set of drop down menus. It is very similar to Andy Staines’ Admin Dropdown Menus. Unfortunately, Admin Dropdown Menus really changed with the WP 2.5 release and the author has subsequently stated he will no longer support it. Lighter Menus looked like it might be a suitable replacement so I decided to give it a try.
I really liked the way Lighter Menus works except for one thing: The custom Swim Team menu didn’t work right. The URLs weren’t constructed correctly. Bummer. But I really liked the way it looked. Was this the compelling event to fix the growing Swim Team menu? The Swim Team menu was really unwieldy when using the standard Dashboard as well.
As I worked on phpHtmlLib I tested all of the examples and I kept coming back to the TabControlWidget thinking it might be a good solution for wp-SwimTeam. The TabControlWidget is a CSS based solution which presents different content based on which tab is selected.
Earlier this week, I decided to try it and see if it would work. The implementation turned out to be really simple and I was able to use all of individual page code almost verbatim. I like this implementation much better and I think it is much, much easier to use. This decision also let me clean up some of the code which had been duplicated between the Admin and User side and resulted in the elimination of a half a dozen PHP file.
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