These are some readers' responses. Read the full article to see what all the fuss is about.
-
Popular
Categories
- .Net & C# (1)
- Architecture (3)
- C++ (5)
- Coding (4)
- Copyright, etc. (3)
- HTML/CSS (2)
- Java (14)
- JavaScript (6)
- JUnit (3)
- Recommendations (10)
- Risks (8)
- Software projects (2)
- SQL (4)
- Testing (6)
- Tools (5)
- Usability (2)
- Web (5)
- Web publishing (16)
- Windows (1)
- WordPress (27)
86 responses
Other comment pages: « 1 2 3 [4] 5 »
Great plug-in. What keeps me from using it right now is that I have about 110 posts to go through. Is there some way of making this more easy?
I.e. One page that displays all post headings, along with the options of assigning the different categories? Rather than having to click through each single post…
Thanks you ever so much!
There was a bug in the topcat_the_main_category_id() tag that prevented it from doing anything at all. Fixed and now at version 1.4.
And Modifoo, your idea is a keeper. I would like to implement it, but here’s a question: what’s even more time-consuming than having a baby? Answer: having another baby.
Bennet, thanks for your great plug-in, I’ve found it very useful and am looking to use it in permalink structures (perhaps what Mark Matienzo was asking.)
For example, /%topcat%/%postname%
Is there a way to do that? If not, have you any suggestions for someone with limited PHP skills to start on a hack—I looked at rewrite.php and it made sense but didn’t seem amendable to amateur tweaking.
Hi! It’s a really useful plugin, thank you!
But I have one problem (after upgrading to WordPress 2.1) - the_permalink of the post don’t know anything about my main category. for example, if my post belongs to two categories (first with id=5 and second, id=10) and the main category was created later then not main (and has bigger id), the permalink would be first/post_slug, but I need it would be second/post_slug
Earlier, in WordPress 2.0 it worked without this mistake.
Hope, you can advise something.
And sorry for my English.
Hi,
thanks for the great plugin, I just don’t see the radio button near the categories. Using WP 2.0.10
Any ideas why? Or how to fix that? thx
Yantar, I considered adding this feature but didn’t have time - it seemed a bit tricky to do. If it worked for you before then it was probably just chance… it’s still on my to-do list though.
Vlado, I will try to find time to check this out. I’ve not seen this problem, though I have not tried that exact version of WP.
This is not only a great plugin, but also a really good idea! I love the fact that it does not need to modify the database structure and how you took advantage of a feature that the WP developers decided to drop.
There’s only two things I see that could make it even better:
1. What some guys here were already asking (namely Mark A. Matienzo, Yuri Gadow and Yantar): having the main category slug in the permalinks. That would be really useful.
Unfortunately I don’t know a word about coding (I tried), but May I ask you to have a look at the sCategory plugin? That’s exactly what we are talking about and the script is similar to Top Cat in some ways. Sorry if you already knew that or if my suggestion is totally useless.
2. It would also be really nice if the JavaScript requirement could be skipped. I would imagine it’s quite hard to change the categories form without editing any core files, but PozHonks wrote some code to change the form at the same point Top Cat does include its bits with JavaScript (the replacement looks simpler, though) and Otto42 mentions that there’s two hooks to modify the post writing page.
Again, sorry if those suggestions sound too stupid. As I can’t code, I just wanted to see if I could help by doing some research.
BTW, for all those being a bit rude to developers, please think twice before doing it again. Guys like Bennett could just keep their work to themselves and the share it with the comunity instead. If you think you deserve some respect for what you do at work, you should show some to those who try to help for the heck of it.
All the best.
Thanks for all that, Frames. Yes, the sCategory plugin will be useful to provide inspiration and ideas for the permalink feature. As for the JavaScript requirement, I think the PozHonks way (using output buffering) is the only way to go. I don’t normally like using OB because of efficiency — I was hoping there would be another way to do it — but as this is an admin-only page is shouldn’t matter too much.
I will make the changes probably in the next update to Top Cat, but I don’t know when I will be able to do that.
And thanks for your other comments. I think Top Cat is a bit less obviously useful than some of my other plugins, so I understand why some people don’t like it.
It’s cool to hear my two cents are worth it. Thank you for your interest, Bennett.
Let me just point you out to another resource that I’ve found: add_rewrite_tag(). Internal permalink control and the documentation for it are in their infancy, but it looks to me as if this is what we are looking for. At least, with that %postname% mentioned in the page. Hope that helps.
Regarding the usefulness of Top Cat, if you are able to incorporate the main category (or the Top Cat to be correct
to the permalink, it would be more beneficial than what we all could think of at first sight. At least with another neat and also highly requested plugin, the Top Level Plugin. That would make permalinks very flexible.
To put it straight, Top Level is quite simple, it just removes the “category_base” in the archives permalinks, something that is being longly requested in the forums.
So if one just puts together Top Cat + Top Level, adds /%top_cat%/%postname%/ (or the like) in the custom permalink structure, and leaves the base category blank in the Permalinks admin section, he’ll have the killer permalink structure. And something that’s not truly possible with the current WP code.
Let me set an example to make things clear. With WordPress you can have something like this out of the box:
http://server/topics/code/wordpress/
… where server is your domain name (a fixed string), topics is the category base (again, static) and code/wordpress is the category itself (the only part that’s “dynamic” in the url).
Looks cool at first sight, but unfortunately (a) topics are the same for every post in the database and [doh!] (b) if you have more than one category in the post, the category in the permalink is “chosen” by WP, not the user [double doh!].
If we use Top Level, we can have just:
http://server/code/wordpress
… which solves item “a” above. If you include all the other categories one author can have, this is great, as you have a very well structured site by only using categories. Just add some pages for the more static content if you want. I don’t think you can have a page with the same slug than a category (not sure, I’ll test it), but that’s not a problem, really. And this is about choice, anyway, just avoid pages with same slug than any top-level category (second-level categories should not be a problem here).
Now, with (the “improved”) Top Cat, you could get rid of problem “b” and have exactly the same url:
http://server/code/wordpress/
The BIG advantage here is again that the blogger/user/author is deciding which category really matters for him/her. That’s what you did with Top Cat in the first place, of course. If the Top Category is the main “section” of the site, it looks like a perfect option.
To me, this helps a lot when using WP both as a CMS or as a “multiple-blog” tool. And this would help a lot of people separate their site in several “sections” or sub-weblogs with little or no effort. Think about this:
http://server/journal/ …
http://server/photolog/ …
http://server/articles/ …
http://server/reviews/ …
… and so on.
Just add a link to each category and you have a menu for the site. Obviously, you can style the posts in different ways with the Top Cat and CSS. Cool, straightforward and clean, isn’t it?
You could have the same permalink structures without Top Cat provided that you assign one (and only one) category to each post. But if you have a category for tags, that’s a no-no. Same if you have a category for authors or whatever you can think of.
Of course, there would always be the option to use the top category in any other part of the url. Or don’t do it at all.
My personal opinion is that these two features (having the option to turn “base_category” off and deciding which is the main category) need to be in WP’s core. But that’s only me, you know. To my knowledge, TextPattern can do something similar to this but does not have the flexibility of multiple categories, and b2evo has the main cat feature but does not know how to incorporate it in the url. I’m not sure about MovableType and the rest. I think WP developers are thinking on giving the users the ability to get rid of the category base. That would make Top Level redundant, but Top Cat would still be useful. I don’t think something like Top Level has to be in Top Cat’s code, anyway.
Excuse me for the looong rant here. I’m sure it can be explained with less words and stuff.
Frames, you say you don’t know coding but you are a software designer at heart. You’re right that Top Cat would be more useful if it had the permalink feature — the only reason I have not implemented it is that I don’t need it personally. (Lazy, I know.) But I do plan to implement it. However…
When WP 2.3 comes out, it will have support for tagging in the core. When that happens I plan to switch my personal blog to allow only a single category per post, and use tags for other “categories”. If you use tags like this, Top Cat is not really necessary. We just need a plugin to enforce single category selection — the PozHonks code does that.
As I say, I still do plan to do the permalinks feature in Top Cat. Only then will I consider it “finished”. Thanks for your support and encouragement!
Hey, very good plugin. It’s very usefull for me. Great. Martino
Frames: Try this instead of the_permalink()
/post_name; ?>Frames: my comment got croped here is the php code for permalink:
echo topcat_the_main_category_slug().’/’ . $post->post_name;
Thanks for such a great list of plugins, this list are so helpful for the new guy.
Thanks
Vic
Other comment pages: « 1 2 3 [4] 5 »