Adhesive

IMHO – for what it is worth – this is a plug in that has been overtaken by WP development and isnt necessary any more.

Is there then a built-in sticky function in 1.5, Root? If so, please do tell where it may be found.

Brian, try editing a post through the Manage section. You should see a check box below the radio buttons in Advanced/Post Status. Not sure why it doesn’t show up on the actual Write page….

Not precisely. But generally many of us are in favour of eliminating or at least reducing reliance on plugins – many of which are fine but all of which bring their own issues. Cross theme compatability being one. Upgrades being two. There is no sticky function but there is masses of additional functionality which can deliver the same effect. Be it a new dedicated template, an edited loop, or an if else conditional. None of which require a plugin.

Not a real good idea from the POV of those of us who don’t “do” code. Those of us who are not coders in whatever language (in this case, php) rely on those who write plugins to help us out.

So what you’re saying here is that the “powers that be” who produce WP have now decided that in order for some functionalities to be used, we all have to learn php? This is direct from Matt, Ryan, et al? Could you point me to a post on the dev blog where this is explicitly deliniated?

That is nonsense. I made no mention of the devs who have nothing to do with it.
But as a general practice if every time we need to do anything we use a plugin it soon becomes unmanageable. And there are many old my hacks and plugins which have been overtaken by WP 1.5. new functionality. The difficulty is fitting the bits in the tool box together to solve the problem in the simplest and most efficient way. Just about anyone could copy index.php save it as home.php and paste in their sticky text. There it is. And I might add that most people familiar with my efforts know that to me simplicity is next to godliness.

Hmmm. Well, I’m wondering then who “many of us” might be. And obviously if it’s not the developers, then those of us who don’t code don’t need to do anything but use the plugins available and therefore have no worries, ain’t?

I don’t have “difficulty” making plugins work, and I have tried your vaunted “solution” of using “home.php”; I don’t personally like it after playing with it for a month or so. When I want a sticky post, I want a sticky post at the top of the list of recent posts – I don’t want a separate page which has to be clicked past even if one has seen it already. And separate pages come with their own set of problems, as a look through the Troubleshooting section will show.

Sticky posts by their express nature are there to be read ONCE by each person who accesses the blog – after which they can be ignored if one has seen them already. A new sticky will be obvious by its newness, and then treated the same. People are used to this functionality from fora all over the net. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel.

The “home.php” idea was interesting to begin with, but it’s just another layer of stuff for most of us, y’know. And it’s a layer of stuff that doesn’t provide any real functionality expansion, the way some plugins do. (Yes, there are silly plugins which provide little if any viable functionality – the DST one comes instantly to mind – but for the most part, plugins are perfect for keeping the core WP size smaller while allowing a fairly large ability to customize to one’s taste.)

We’ll agree to disagree on this one, shall we? Yes, for you changing a 3 column to 2 column site or vice versa, the “home.php” trick is fine, but for many of us that is not something that will ever arise.

[And no, it was NOT nonsense – your posted statement came across very much as if “Root and the important people” thought this way, instead of “Root and those who think home.php is the wave of the future”. But since I “apparently” misunderstood, I stand corrected.]

Well here it is on a on a plate

And incidentally you have misrepresented the importance of home php. It takes us one step higher up the template hierarchy. What you can do with that is only limited by imagination. Obviously in short supply.

And this is “better” than a plugin? Not for me, thanks. I do not WANT to know how to do multiple query loops or whathehellever.

And I note from the explanatories that certain of the code-changes are “template-dependant” so would that not indicate that you have to do them over for every theme you have installed? Plugins don’t require that sort of dinking around. Plugins get dropped into the plugin folder, activated, and work with all themes installed.

Those who like to screw around with code in the core files and themes are welcome to do so. I don’t want to do it, I don’t have time to mess with it, and I’m happy that there are people like Owen Winkler who provide a drop-in solution.

[[“obviously in short supply”…. well, let’s not go into name-calling, shall we?]]

And you think plugins are not template dependant ? Ok.

Not so far as I’ve found. I use a round dozen themes on one site, with the following plugins working WITHOUT A HITCH on all of them:

Adhesive 2.1 beta
WeatherIcon 2.01
Countdown 1.0 alpha 5
Enhanced Post List 0.1
Fancy Tooltips 1.2.1
Random QOTD 1.0
ReferrerBouncer 1.1
Shire Reckoning 2 0.75
Spam Karma 1.20 alpha 2
Theme Switcher 0.3
WP SpamAssassin 0.6.2

S’all good.

Settle down, you two.

Brianbonner, did you find the “sticky” reference in your Write Post screen? It should be there if the plugin was properly installed and activated.

From what I understand, the next version of WordPress will not feature an easy-to-use, built-in “sticky” or adhesive feature. Maybe in future releases. For now, the plugins will do the easy work of “sticking” a post towards the top.

For those who want more sophisticated coding techniques, and who are willing to write up their explanations and examples on their site or in the WordPress Codex, we all eagerly await the resource(s). We are all here to learn, and some of us want to learn a lot and some a little and ain’t we lucky that WordPress allows us to do both and still create fascinating WordPress sites.

CG-PostOrder also offers a ‘sticky’ solution, with the addition of you can denote forced order of sticky posts. It requires a minor code mod to 1.5.0, but works ‘out of the box’ with 1.5.1 (and should with recent nightlies, as the fixes were in weeks ago).

I disagree with the direction that WordPress should become a bloated monolithic application. Plugins serve a useful position, as added functions not everyone needs or wants. True, something like basic ‘sticky’ has been in hacks for over a year, and could be in the core without much of any overhead.

I do agree that there are advantages to certain functionality being in the core product. Apple and Microsoft are classic examples of companies seeing value in third-party enhancements, and adopting similar functions into core OS/apps. That’s a progression. But with WP, I’d only see this for lightweight stuff. Frankly, I’d like to see MORE functionality broken out into plugins, less absorbed into the ‘core’, so the ‘core’ becomes as lightweight as possible. But that’s just me! ??

Anyone wants to try out PostOrder, grab the latest CG-PowerPack, and start a new thread if you have Qs.

-d

Well, David, that’s two of us. I’ll have to get the latest distro from you – I’ve been remiss in that direction. PostOrder sounds interesting, and I’m about ready to set up FeedRead again on another site.

Btw, Lorelle, even though Adhesive is installed and working just fine on two of my blogs, it doesn’t appear in the Write Post screen, only in the Manage Post screen – no matter which theme is active.

vkaryl –

Definitely check it out. The UI is still in the early stages, and uses inserted buttons in an admin’s view of the site to currently allow quickly-tagging static/ordered items. The overall approach was that I’ve gotten sick of having to get into edit mode to change some quick property on a post — so CG-PostOrder and CG-Related now use inline buttons for quick control over secondary ‘tagging’ of posts. Only visible to admins, of course. ??

I intended to then give you ‘up/down’ buttons to manually re-order the posts, but I decided to wait until it was being used by enough people who needed the added functionality — it’ll probably go in the admin page, letting you increase the post order for a given tagged post. Just easier to manage that way.

Actually, it’s all in the database already — post ordering, that is. So if you tag a post, and >really< wanted it above everything else, for the moment you COULD manually go into the db record and increase the order to something above the default value of 1… (or, set to 0 to put it after the other ‘stickies’).

I’m still looking for more feature requests, of course. ??

-d