Category: Wordpress

Four new Lib Dem policy consultation websites

Another shiny new Lib Dem site goes up.

We’ve just released the new policy consultation website – consult.libdems.org.uk.

It’s built on the previous experience of Rob Fenwick’s Meeting the Challenge website and the Make IT Policy consultation site that Richard Allan and I worked on back in 2002 and has the consultations for:

The Taking Power consultation (another Allan/Tod production together with Alex Davies and Paul Tyler) has generated more response than I expected – so it will be interesting to see how much response these generate.

First WordPress Plug-In

My first WordPress plug-in: Decurlify RSS.

This deals with the hugely irritating feature that WordPress has of putting curly quotes into titles of RSS feeds. These then can appear as question marks when aggregated elsewhere (for example using the Magpie RSS feed reader).

Just install this plug-in and all these annoying curly quotes should be removed from the titles of your feed entries!

You can find the plug-in here.

First non-Lib Dem WordPress widget…

February 21, 2008: Version 1.2. Bug-fix to ensure that it works with the new datastructure in the latest versions of WordPress. A huge thank you to Will Howells for fixing this.

September 16, 2006: Version 1.1. Bug-fix to ensure that it ‘remembers’ your root page when the Widget page is updated.

Here’s the first of two new WordPress Widgets, and, for the first time, it’s not Lib Dem specific.

It lets you show a subsection of the pages of your WordPress blog. The options page for the widget shows a drop-down box of all the pages in your blog. Select one of them and only pages below that will be displayed by the widget on the menu.

I’m using it on Make IT Policy to have a menu section that only shows the pages of the Make IT Policy policy paper.

You can find the Widget here on the WordPress website.

If you already have widgets installed as part of your WordPress installation, you can try this widget out yourself. All you need to do to use it:

  1. Download the ldpagehierarchy.zip file, extract the ldpagehierarchy.php file and save it or upload it into your widget plug-ins directory.
  2. Go into the ‘Plugins’ area of your WordPress installation and activate the ‘Sub page hierarchy’ widget.
  3. Go into the ‘Sidebar Widgets’ section of the ‘Presentation’ area of WordPress, and drag your new ‘Sub page hierarchy’ widget to the desired location.
  4. Hit the configure icon, select the page that is the parent of the pages you want to show in your page hierarchy and then close the configuration box.
  5. Hit ‘Save Changes’

er, that’s it.

If you don’t have widgets installed, head off to Automaticc’s Widgets project page and follow their extremely helpful instructions on how to install widgets and add them to your blog template.

You can find lots of useful widgets via the WordPress Widgets blog.

perbandingan smartphone

Welcome to the third Lib Dem widget…

Another widget!

This one puts the party’s campaign buttons on a WordPress site and gives you the option to change the number of buttons that are displayed.

If you already have widgets installed as part of your WordPress installation, you can try this widget out yourself. All you need to do to use it:

  1. Download the ldbuttons.php.txt file and save it or upload it into your widget plug-ins directory under the name ‘ldbuttons.php’
  2. Go into the ‘Plugins’ area of your WordPress installation and activate the ‘Lib Dem Buttons’ widget.
  3. Go into the ‘Sidebar Widgets’ section of the ‘Presentation’ area of WordPress, and drag your new ‘Lib Dem Buttons’ widget to the desired location.
  4. Hit ‘Save Changes’

er
 that’s it.

If you don’t have widgets installed, head off to Automaticc’s Widgets project page and follow their extremely helpful instructions on how to install widgets and add them to your blog template.

Another Lib Dem widget

Hat-tip to Will Howells for creating the second Lib Dem widget.

The rather fine ‘Lib Dem blogs’ plug in on the right hand side (of the front page).

Will’s still tweaking it, but let him know if you’d like to try the latest version.

For all the latest news on Lib Dem widgets, check out this blogs ‘widget’ category.

Postnote:

Will has now supplied me with the original code. If you already have widgets installed as part of your WordPress installation, you can try this widget out yourself. All you need to do to use it:

  1. Download the ldblogbox.php.txt file and save it or upload it into your widget plug-ins directory under the name ‘ldblogbox.php’
  2. Go into the ‘Plugins’ area of your WordPress installation and activate the ‘LibDemBlogs link box’ widget.
  3. Go into the ‘Sidebar Widgets’ section of the ‘Presentation’ area of WordPress, and drag your new ‘LibDemBlogs box’ widget to the desired location.
  4. Hit ‘Save Changes’

er
 that’s it.