wheresrhys

Well – here it is. As promised earlier, my first ever software release into the open source world is an adaption of Eric Meyer’s MW adminize plug-in to give the wordpress admin interface a fixed toolbar along the top of the screen and so that the publish post box is always visible on the right. Scrolling up while posting to your blog can finally be consigned to the past.

The plug-in works on all modern browsers, (Safari, Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, and almost certainly all others with good CSS support). It will however leave everything unchanged in ie6 as it has poor support for position:fixed.

Here is the download: toolbarize.zip.

Simply unzip it into your plugins folder – no additional setup required.

Visually, I’d like to rehash how the publish box appears – it doesn’t sit well either where it is now or lower down, so a redesign may be in order. Also, I need to work out how to add some javascript to better resize the upload media screen (at present the close button is hidden, but you can just click off the screen to make it disappear.

Please let me know if you have any suggested improvements

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.