wheresrhys

I’ve just spent a  little time adding some useful sounding plug-ins (initially prompted by wanting an effective backlinking plug-in), one of which was the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plug-in. So, with that installed I finally got around to upgrading wordpress and, to both my delight and dismay, wordpress has changed its admin screens layout since the last version I had (2.3 I think). It’s a much better design, but it does break toolbarize. In fact, it renders it unneccessary as the layout is much more user friendly and screen-space efficient, with scrolling not being no nearly so disruptive to the postying process.

However, it has inspired me to write a plug-in which makes perfect use of screen space by hiding things I very rarely use… or putting them in the footer. I could even make it so users can customise which screen elements are hidden.

Further to my post about the usefulness of position:fixed, in particular with regard to the .submitbox in the wordpress admin interface, I’ve continued to refine it all.

I came across Eric Meyer’s MW Adminize WordPress plugin (via the latest Sitepoint list of useful CSS links). Essentially what it does is compress the navigation and header of the admin screens into a smaller area by including an extra stylesheet.

“Hang on, ” think I. “Now that looks pretty much like a toolbar – why not use position:fixed on it”. Which is what I’ve done, and the effect is most satisfactory. There’s was a bit of ironing out to do as various page elements (which presumably have position: relative/absolute) overlaid it, but z-index:2000; soon sorted that out.

At present I’ve had to edit not just Eric Meyer’s CSS file, but also a couple of the php pages in order to insert a div with id=”toolbar”, but in a future iteration I will painstakingly go through each page element that needs position fixed and then remove the containing div, thus making it a candidate to be a branch of the original plug-in.

Watch this space.