WordPress admin screen tweaks
| blogging, geek, kaizen, wordpressA 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… =)