WordPress admin screen tweaks

| blogging, geek, kaizen, wordpress

A few months ago, I decided to experiment with publishing (mostly) one post a day, scheduling posts to go out at 8 AM. That’s been working well for me, although I now have a backlog of 22 scheduled posts (as of March 11), and I keep reshuffling my queue because I want to post some things sooner.

I started using the Manage Posts page a lot. I checked the dates in the queue and used quick-edit to move posts around. I double-checked missed posts (grr). I looked up posts that got scheduled at 8 PM instead of 8 AM.

And then I decided to code in a whole bunch of things that would make life a little bit easier for me. =) I got rid of columns I didn’t use, increased the number of posts per page, added a few custom columns, and styled things differently. Kaizen: relentless improvement!

Just in case I find this useful in the future, or someone else wants to do something similar:

<?php
/**
 * @package Sacha_Chua
 * @author Sacha Chua
 * @version 0.1
 * Feel free to use this under the GNU General Public License v3 
 * or the Creative Commons Attribution License
 *
 * 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 3 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, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
 */
/*
Plugin Name: Sacha Chua's fixes
Plugin URI: https://sachachua.com/#
Description: Tweaks to make my life easier
Author: Sacha Chua
Version: 0.1
Author URI: https://sachachua.com/
*/

add_filter('manage_posts_columns', 'sacha_manage_posts_columns');
add_action('manage_posts_custom_column', 'sacha_manage_posts_custom_column');
add_action('admin_head', 'sacha_admin_head');
add_filter('edit_posts_per_page', 'sacha_edit_posts_per_page');
define('POSTS_PER_PAGE', 50);

/**
 * Increase posts per page to at least POSTS_PER_PAGE
 */
function sacha_edit_posts_per_page($page) {
  return ($page < POSTS_PER_PAGE) ? POSTS_PER_PAGE : $page;
}
/**
 * Resize the columns
 */
function sacha_admin_head() { ?>
  <style type="text/css">
  .column-time { width: 150px; }
  .column-categories { width: 300px }
  .column-status { width: 100px }
  .scheduled { color: green } 
  </style>
<?php }
/**
 * Remove the tags column
 */
function sacha_manage_posts_columns($defaults) {
  unset($defaults['tags']);
  unset($defaults['author']);
  unset($defaults['date']);
  $defaults['status'] = __('Status');
  $defaults['time'] = __('Date');
  return $defaults;
}

/**
 * Show the time if it's not 8 AM, and show the status and date
 */
function sacha_manage_posts_custom_column($column_name) {
  global $post;
  switch ($column_name) {
    case 'status':
      if ( '0000-00-00 00:00:00' == $post->post_date) {
        _e('Unpublished');
      } elseif ('publish' == $post->post_status) {
        echo '<div class="published">' . __('Published') . '</div>';
      } elseif ('future' == $post->post_status) {
        $time_diff = time() - get_post_time('G', true, $post);
        if ( $time_diff > 0 ) {
          echo '<strong class="attention">' . __('Missed schedule') . '</strong>';
        }
        else {
          echo '<div class="scheduled">' . __('Scheduled') . '</div>';
        }
      } else {
        _e('Last Modified');
      }
      break;
    case 'time':
      if ( '0000-00-00 00:00:00' != $post->post_date) {
        $t_time = get_the_time(__('g:i A'));
        if ($t_time == '8:00 AM') {
          $t_time = '';
        }
        $t_date = get_the_time(__('Y/m/d'));
        print $t_date . ' ' . $t_time;
      }
  }
}
?>

Next step might be to make a plugin that automatically handles scheduling for me. Or even rearranging my queue… Hmm… =)

You can comment with Disqus or you can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.