My Virtual Display

If you are familiar with Drupal, you are probably familiar with the concept of a “book”. A Drupal “book” is a collection of Web pages that are automatically tied together with proper hyperlinks, so that there is no need to build navigation manually.  There is typically a table-of-contents page and a number of chapter pages.  Recently, I needed to build a few “books” in WordPress, so I ended up writing a little plugin that I called Bookworm.

The data organization in WordPress allows to build “books” rather easily. WordPress pages are hierarchical, so it is possible to create any number of chapter pages to which the table-of-contents page would be a parent.  So all you need is a way to automatically generate a table of contents (essentially, a linked list of the current page’s children) and a a way to automatically build a navigation menu with links to previous chapter page, table of contents, and next chapter page.

Enter the Bookworm plugin.

Put [bookworm_list_pages] into the table-of-contents page, and it will output a list of pages which list the current page as their parent.  For now, pages can be listed only in order of their ID (which, conveniently, is also the order in which they were created).  Putting [bookworm_flip_pages] into a chapter page will output hyperlinks to previous chapter, table of contents (which is assumed to be on the parent page), and next chapter.

It’s been a while since I wanted to give my modest WordPress-related efforts a place of their own.  Well, here it is: the WordPress Projects page.

Include_HTML, the little WordPress plugin that I wrote a while ago, has been getting a small, but enthusiastic, following. Growth pains, as was to be expected, were soon to follow. It turns out that include_HTML is not working with WordPress 2.7. Luckily, the issue was fairly easy to fix, so I am pleased to present include_HTML 0.2…

The installation is WordPress standard:

1. Download and unzip the include-html-0-2.zip file.
2. Create an include-html directory on your WordPress server under wp-content/plugins.
3. Put include-html.php into that directory.
4. Activate the plugin using WordPress’ administrative interface.

Usage has not changed from the previous version: create a file containing (or dynamically generating using PHP or any other programming language) any combination of HTML and JavaScript you want (for example, let’s say the file is accessible as http://mysite.com/myfile.php) and include it into your post or page as follows:

[include_HTML: http://mysite.com/myfile.php]

A reader asks a question:

I am unable to add the a form object (book.php) after inserting [include_HTML: http://mysite.com/book.php] into page. Is there any issues with this plugin working with wordpress 2.7.1?

I did a quick test on a 2.7 installation and confirmed that the plugin indeed doesn’t work.   The reason has something to do with how the visual editor in 2.7 works.   Back in the times of WP 2.3, when include_HTML was developed, [include_HTML: http://example.com/] was stored as such.  Now, whatever the reason, the HTML editor transforms it into this:

[include_HTML:  http://example.com/]

There are two fixes for this problem:

1. Omit the whitespace between include_HTML: and the URL, like this:

[include_HTML:http://example.com/]

2. If you’re comfortable with PHP coding, open the plugin file (include-html.php), find the include_HTML_display() function in it, and edit one line as described below:

I have updated the plugin code accordingly.

Juan Enriquez discusses the future of the economy, healthcare, technology, and evolution (the original is here).