Page Blocks WordPress Plugin

Happy New Year everyone… I hope you all have had a wonderful and safe holiday season!

First a special thanks to both Amy Bevan and JCDonley of Dawnsinger LLC for making a donation to support my work on the plugin during 2009… believe me it’s very much appreciated!

Unfortunately I don’t paid for working on the plugin so I can’t afford to spend a great deal of time working on it; sadly goodwill doesn’t pay the bills. So I apologise if an update has been a long time coming. However if hopefully more people can contibute even just a little then I’ll be able to dedicate some more time to it.

That out of the way, as some of you may already know version 1.1.0 of the Page Blocks plugin has been released, and it brings with it a couple of changes:

• The plugin now works with WP 2.8 & 2.9
• The configuration of page blocks is now on a separate admin page
• Themes using multiple loops are now handled (only needed for WP prior to 2.8)

The configuration of page blocks is now done on a separate admin page called Page Blocks under the Settings menu, removing the complexity and making it easier to configure multiple pages at the same time.

The configuration is still done by checking the appropriate checkboxes to enable them and entering CSS into the textbox to the right of each checkbox, so nothing new there.

Also what became apparent was that some themes used many different WordPress loops, and this caused a whole lot of headaches. So now for users of WordPress prior to v2.8 there is a template function called page_blocks_loop() that can be added into your theme immediately before the loop you want to apply the page blocks to; all other loops will be ignored.

Thankfully with WordPress 2.8 the plugin can automatically determine which is the main loop and this template function is not required.

I haven’t been able to update the information on this site just yet, but hopefully the information on the WordPress.org site will be enough to get people started.

FYI I have had a couple of reports of users not being able to use the plugin at all as it causes a fatal PHP error. I’m not 100% sure if this is a PHP 4 problem but it sounds like one.

I am working on resolving this issue, and if someone out there is using the plugin without problems with PHP 4 then I’d appreciate it if you could let me know as I don’t currently have PHP 4 set up. Nevertheless I will post a patch for those users having this trouble as soon as I can.

I hope you all have a great year for 2010, and keep on plugin!

Regards,
Paolo