Last night’s meeting was a quiet one, not too surprising given the awful weather that turned up that afternoon. But as always, it was a great meeting; everyone got to contribute, and I think everyone got something from it. Here are my rambling recollections from the meeting
The issue of debugging and specifically logging came; Phil Norton reminded us of his write-up of the last time I mentioned the subject.
Phil also asked about dynamically powering a secondary menu using WordPress’ built in navigation menus. He also found that the navigation system doesn’t always highlight, the appropriate menu item when you are in certain parts of a site. For example, if you have a category link in your navigation menu, WordPress doesn’t automatically highlight that menu item when you are viewing a post with that category [actually I think that’s fixed now, at least it’s working for me in WordPress 3.2.1 using a TwentyTen child theme]. I think he ended up having to hack a couple of off the shelf plugins to get to his solution, and even writing his own custom walker. One of the plugins mentioned by Perry was List Pages at Depth. Although slightly out of date, Perry recommended it.
I also mentioned that I had written some code using one of the hooks around the menu navigation but couldn’t recall the hook. I found it this morning.
The hook I was using is the wp_nav_menu_objects filter. My code removes a couple of items if the user is not logged in.
add_filter('wp_nav_menu_objects', 'aep2010_logged_in_menu', 10, 2);
function aep2010_logged_in_menu($sorted_menu_items, $args) {
if ($args->theme_location == 'primary' && !is_user_logged_in()){
foreach ($sorted_menu_items as $index => $item) {
if ( $item->post_name == 'forum' ) {
unset( $sorted_menu_items[$index] );
}
if ( $item->post_name == 'members' ) {
unset( $sorted_menu_items[$index] );
}
}
}
return $sorted_menu_items;
} // end aep2010_logged_in_menu
Around the same space is the filter wp_nav_menu_args which could be used to swap menus based on the context of the page being displayed.
I also talked about the group project to build a new site for AllFM community radio. Unfortunately progress on this project has been slow to non-existent recently. I appealed for one or more of our members to come up with some wire-frames on how the new site might look. If you want to get involved ask on the mailing list (you can sign up in the sidebar), and I’ll add you to the BaseCamp project we are using to co-ordinate the thing.
Perry, at earlier prompting from Gurbir, demonstrated the newly updated WordPress Android App for us all including the ability to post with photos directly from your phone. It took a little fiddling with web cams and Phil’s backward netbook to enable us all to see the demo — you can’t get that many people to crowd around a phone screen!
There were a few other bits and bats talked about, but I never write enough notes! I hope a pleasant evening was had by all.
If you want to attend next months meeting, please do come along, everyone is welcome. In the meantime sign up to the mailing list and keep an eye out for what will be on the agenda.
Speaking of agendas, if anyone has a little talk on something WordPress related they’d like to give to the group, please shout up on the mailing list. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, or long, and it especially doesn’t need slides (though if you have them great!) It can be a simple as “How I used plugins X and Y to achieve effect Z on my site”. Or perhaps “How to set up an ePetition on WordPress” *cough* Gurbir *cough*.
Update: Gurbir has volunteered to do a demo on setting up petitions next month :-).
If you attended last night, and I missed something worth noting, please leave a comment.
See you all next month.