It lets users login, and then redirects them back to the page they logged in from rather than the backend, it also shows error messages. Read more for more information and the download link.

Sidebar Login

Sidebar login is self explanatory really; it allows users to login to wordpress from the sidebar! This plugin requires wordpress 2.6 (that is all I have tested) in order to function; this is because wordpress 2.6 has a modified login system to older versions.

Screenshots

Login Form

Logged in

Change Log

You can track changes to the plugin in the wordpress plugin SVN.

Get it now!

You can get the latest version from the wordpress plugin database; Download it here!

Installation Instructions

1. Unzip and upload the php file to your wordpress plugin directory
2. Activate the plugin
3. For a sidebar widget: Goto the design > widgets tab – Drag the widget into a sidebar and save!
4. To use the template tag: Add <?php sidebarlogin(); ?> to your template.

License

WordPress Sidebar Login © Copyright 2008-current. Mike Jolley

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
optimised

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA

Show your support – ensure continued development

I put a lot of effort into all of my plugins; its thirsty work so why not show your support by buying me a nice coffee

A number of users were experiencing errors with the sidebar login widget I created, issues such as bugs with cookies and headers sent. In a bid to stop these errors I have created a new version, compatible with wordpress 2.3.

This version is different to the others because rather than redirecting to the normal wordpress login page to log the user in, it has the code for login built into it, thus (in theory) solving the cookie/headers problems. Hoorar. Read more about the widget after the break.

This clever little widget lets users login from the sidebar, without even touching the wordpress login page. Very handy. The official post is here. Enjoy =)

Download

Show your support

WordPress Download Monitor 1.6

The download monitor lets you upload files to let your visitors download, whilst tracking hits, and letting you easily output the download links in posts.

The 1.6 release has numerous bug fixes, and is fully compatible with wordpress 2.3.

Dedicated official page is here.

WordPress Comment spam stopper

The comment spam stopper plugin adds a simple question to the comment form to stop bots from posting junk comments. Very handy.

This release fixes the bug that made the comment disappear when clicking the back button. For some reason it happened when the anti-spam question was above the comment textarea, so I have moved the spam question below the comment form to fix.

Dedicated official page is here.

Sidebar login widget

This plugin allows users to login to wordpress from the sidebar, as well as providing links to register.

In wordpress 2.3 some people noticed a cookie bug, I believe this is now fixed.

Dedicated official page is here.

Want to allow users to log into wordpress from the sidebar? Doing so is not as simple as it sounds, so to ease your stress I have created a widget to handle everything.

It lets users login, and then redirects them back to the page they logged in from rather than the backend, it also shows error messages. Read more for more information and the download link.

Sidebar Login Widget v1.5 Build 20070122

By Mike Jolley ( http://www.blue-anvil.com )

What is it?

It’s a widget that allows users to login to wordpress from the sidebar! It uses php sessions to cleverly retrieve the wordpress login error messages, and uses redirects to send the user back to the site, rather than the wordpress backend.

Screenshots

User not logged in:

User logged in:

Errors!

Get it now!

| Index |

Installation Instructions

Simply:

1. Unzip and upload the php file to your wordpress plugin directory
2. Activate the plugin
3. Goto the presentation > widgets tab
4. Drag the widget into a sidebar and save!

| Index |

License

WordPress Sidebar Login Widget © Copyright 2007-current.
Mike Jolley

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA

| Index |

Support my sweat, blood and tears

I know, that sounds gross, but we really did put ALOT of effort into this widget. If you like this widget please make a donation via paypal! Any amounts are welcome, your support is much appreciated.

| Index |

They have all kinds of uses, searches, polls, you name it.

This article will show you how to create a customisable Recent post widget for yourself.

Step 1 – Creating the file

First create a file called myRecentPosts_widget.php, you can call it what you like really, as long as you know what it is. Open it up in your favorite text/code editor.

Lets start by adding the ‘php’ tag and some information about the author:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: My Recent Posts widget
Description: Adds a sidebar widget to display posts from a specified category
Author: Mike Jolley, jolley_small@tesco.net
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://blue-anvil.com
*/

Done that? Well done, lets move on.

Step 2 – The widget function begin

Next we need to add the widgets functionality. Lets add the start of our function: the init function, which will wrap all our plugin functionality. We will also add a little code to make sure widgets are enabled (and the widget functions exist), to avoid errors:

1
2
3
4

function widget_myRecentPosts_init() {
 
	if ( !function_exists('register_sidebar_widget') )
		return;

Now we can start adding our widgets functionality, the next code creates our function and gets variable values (some of these we will set later).

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

function widget_myRecentPosts($args) {
 
		// "$args is an array of strings that help widgets to conform to
		// the active theme: before_widget, before_title, after_widget,
		// and after_title are the array keys." - These are set up by the theme
		extract($args);
 
		// These are our own options
		$options = get_option('widget_myRecentPosts');
		$title = $options['title'];  // Title in sidebar for widget
		$show = $options['show'];  // # of Posts we are showing
		$excerpt = $options['ex'];  // Showing the excerpt or not
		$exclude = $options['exclude'];  // Categories to exclude
                      if ($show<1) $show = 1;
		if ($exclude=="") $exclude = "0";

The next piece of code will start outputting to the screen, using the default $args, and our widget title.

1
2

                      // Output
		echo $before_widget . $before_title . $title . $after_title;

Step 3 – The Posts Query

The next code starts pulling results from the database using queries. This is more complex, so don’t worry if it confuses you!

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14

// GET POSTS
			global $wpdb;
			$sql = 'select DISTINCT * from '.$wpdb->posts.'
			INNER JOIN (select * from '.$wpdb->post2cat.'
			INNER JOIN '.$wpdb->categories .' ON '.$wpdb->post2cat.'.category_id = '.$wpdb->categories .'.cat_ID)
			as A ON '.$wpdb->posts.'.ID = A.post_ID
			WHERE (A.cat_ID NOT IN ('.$exclude.'))
			AND '.$wpdb->posts.'.post_status="publish"
			AND '.$wpdb->posts.'.post_type="post"
                        GROUP BY ID
			ORDER BY '.$wpdb->posts.'.post_date
			DESC LIMIT 0,'.$show.';';
 
			$posts = $wpdb->get_results($sql);

The above query gets all posts that are published, not excluded (from one of our options), and orders them by date, limiting the number queried to another of our options.

The next piece of code checks if we had any results, and starts looping to output them in the sidebar.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31

			// start list
			echo '<ul>';
				// were there any posts found?
				if (!empty($posts)) {
					// posts were found, loop through them
					 foreach ($posts as $post) {
 
							// format a date for the posts
							$post->post_date = date("F j, Y",strtotime($post->post_date));
 
							// if we want to display an excerpt, get it/generate it if no excerpt found
							if ($ex) {
								 if (empty($post->post_excerpt)) {
									 $post->post_excerpt = explode(" ",strrev(substr(strip_tags($post->post_content), 0, 100)),2);
									 $post->post_excerpt = strrev($post->post_excerpt[1]);
									 $post->post_excerpt.= " [...]";
								 }
							}
 
							//output to screen
							echo '<li>
							<a class="post" rel="bookmark" href="'.get_permalink($post->ID).'"><span class="inner">
							<strong class="title lifestyle">'.$post->post_date.' - '.$post->post_title.'</strong>';
 
							if ($ex) echo '<br />'.strip_tags($post->post_excerpt);
 
							echo '</span></a></li>';
					 }
				} else echo "<li>No recent Posts</li>";
		// end list
		echo '</ul>';

That was a lot, but its commented so read through to get a better understanding of how the rows are outputted. To finish our function we just close the function (and output the closing element of the widget).

1
2
3

// echo widget closing tag
		echo $after_widget;
	}

Step 4 – Creating the settings

Widgets make it easy to create a small settings dialog for your widget, our widget is going to get settings for:

• Widget title
• posts to show
• whether or not to show excerpt
• Categories to exclude from the list

Lets get started. We declare our settings function, and load the variables.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

	// Settings form
	function widget_myRecentPosts_control() {
 
		// Get options
		$options = get_option('widget_myRecentPosts');
		// options exist? if not set defaults
		if ( !is_array($options) )
			$options = array('title'=>'Recent Posts', 'show'=>'5', 'excerpt'=>'1','exclude'=>'');

Next we check if the settings form has been posted, updating the settings if it has.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

                      // form posted?
		if ( $_POST['recentArticles-submit'] ) {
 
			// Remember to sanitize and format use input appropriately.
			$options['title'] = strip_tags(stripslashes($_POST['recentArticles-title']));
			$options['show'] = strip_tags(stripslashes($_POST['recentArticles-show']));
			$options['excerpt'] = strip_tags(stripslashes($_POST['recentArticles-excerpt']));
			$options['exclude'] = strip_tags(stripslashes($_POST['recentArticles-exclude']));
			update_option('widget_myRecentPosts', $options);
		}

So we have handled posted options, now we need a form! Lets get the options to show in the form by default.

1
2
3
4
5

		// Get options for form fields to show
		$title = htmlspecialchars($options['title'], ENT_QUOTES);
		$show = htmlspecialchars($options['show'], ENT_QUOTES);
		$excerpt = htmlspecialchars($options['excerpt'], ENT_QUOTES);
		$exclude = htmlspecialchars($options['exclude'], ENT_QUOTES);

Now we can happily display the form. Notice we only need to write the fields, the widgets engine handles the form code!

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

		// The form fields
		echo '<p style="text-align:right;">
				<label for="myRecentPosts-title">' . __('Title:') . '
				<input style="width: 200px;" id="myRecentPosts-title" name="myRecentPosts-title" type="text" value="'.$title.'" />
				</label></p>';
		echo '<p style="text-align:right;">
				<label for="myRecentPosts-show">' . __('Show:') . '
				<input style="width: 200px;" id="myRecentPosts-show" name="myRecentPosts-show" type="text" value="'.$show.'" />
				</label></p>';
		echo '<p style="text-align:right;">
				<label for="myRecentPosts-excerpt">' . __('Show excerpt:') . '
				<input style="width: 200px;" id="myRecentPosts-excerpt" name="myRecentPosts-excerpt" type="text" value="'.$excerpt.'" />
				</label></p>';
		echo '<p>Enter the categories to exclude below, this must be a comma separated list of category id\'s!</p>';
		echo '<p style="text-align:right;">
				<label for="myRecentPosts-exclude">' . __('Exclude:') . '
				<input style="width: 200px;" id="myRecentPosts-exclude" name="myRecentPosts-exclude" type="text" value="'.$exclude.'" />
				</label></p>';
		echo '<input type="hidden" id="myRecentPosts-submit" name="myRecentPosts-submit" value="1" />';
	}

And thats that for settings!

Step 5 – Register the widgets

The last piece of code registers the widget for use. After that were done.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

	// Register widget for use
	register_sidebar_widget(array('My Recent Posts', 'widgets'), 'widget_myRecentPosts');
 
	// Register settings for use, 300x100 pixel form
	register_widget_control(array('My Recent Posts', 'widgets'), 'widget_myRecentPosts_control', 300, 200);
}
 
// Run code and init
add_action('widgets_init', 'widget_myRecentPosts_init');
 
?>

Widget armed

Now its finished, upload to plugins directory, activate it, then go to the widgets control panel (under the presentation tab of the wordpress admin) and drag it into one of your sidebar widget sections.

Click the little form icon on the widget to bring up the settings form

In action it looks like this:

Lazy mans corner

For a full code listing, click here

Download it all zipped up below.

Enjoy

I hope my little tutorial on widget creation was of a great help