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45 Responses to “Simple CMS WordPress Plugin”

1. Keith S. on: March 14th, 2008 at 4:51 am

   Thanks for the plug. I had considered going as far as you have with my plugin, but it was more-or-less a one-off thing I did for a client who decided not to use it, so I released it into the wild.

   The only thing I would recommend is to leave the Plugins menu. It’s a nit-picky thing, but even in a simple CMS, I can see where someone might want to add a plugin or two.

2. Chris on: March 14th, 2008 at 11:31 am

   Ryan,

   You are like a God of Wordpress.

   I humbly sacrifice a cattlebeast in your honour.

   Being me, I also ate said cattlebeast.

3. Ryan on: March 14th, 2008 at 11:41 am

   Chris - ROTFLMAO

4. Ryan on: March 14th, 2008 at 11:46 am

   Keith S - I might add an options page with the ability to control what people see and don’t see in the menu eventually and I’ll have an option in there for keeping the plugins page.

5. Ryan on: March 14th, 2008 at 9:22 pm

   The options page has now been added to the plugin and there is an option in there to display the plugins menu item.

6. Giovanni on: March 15th, 2008 at 8:39 am

   It would be cool, if you set up a demo site for people see withou download the plugin first.
   But anyway it seems really cool.

   congrats.
   []’s

7. Ryan on: March 15th, 2008 at 9:51 am

   Giovanni - Yeah, a demo would be nice, bt I’m not keen on opening up an administration panel to the public as I’m not sure what sort of security risks may be involved with that.

8. Simple CMS WordPress Plugin « Sökoptimering on: March 17th, 2008 at 1:21 am

   […] mars 17, 2008 Om man endast har tänkt sig att använda WordPress som ett CMS så vill man troligtvis minska ner antalet menyer för att slippa se tex kommentarer, inlägg m.m. Nu finns det ett plugin som kan fixa detta åt dig och det hittar du här: Simple CMS WordPress Plugin. […]

9. Ryan on: March 17th, 2008 at 8:07 pm

   I’ve decided to take Giovanni’s advice and add a demo site.

   Click here to visit the site

   And click here to visit the admin panel

   Username: test
   Password: test

   Feel free to add whatever content you want as long as it isn’t potentially offensive to others please.

10. Dennis on: March 25th, 2008 at 12:22 am

    Great plugin, just what I need! There seems to be a > too much in line 54 though

11. Ryan on: March 25th, 2008 at 1:44 am

    Thanks Dennis. I’ll fix that shortly.

12. Dennis on: March 25th, 2008 at 8:05 am

    No problem

    Could you tell me how I could add a menu point to be allowed/disallowed?

13. Dennis on: March 25th, 2008 at 11:03 am

    ..and I don’t know if you ment to do this, but the gallery and media library is removed from the “add an image” option of the wysiwyg editor. This way there is no way for an editor to upload a new image as I see it?

14. Ryan on: March 25th, 2008 at 5:15 pm

    Excluding pages from the menu? Um, I should have added that as an option in the admin panel I spose. I’ll add that once I’ve fixed the other problems you’ve pointed out.

    I didn’t relise the gallery and media library problem, it certainly wasn’t intentional and will be corrected.

15. Dennis on: March 25th, 2008 at 8:47 pm

    Perfect, you’r a god

    I have a (two actually) simple idea for a CMS releated plugin if you are interested?

    - It would be great if one could have more than one content area in WP. For example a content area (main loop) and then maybe a content area for “latest news”. The way I think this could be acomplished is if you could look for subpages below the current page and if one of them is called e.g. ##LeftContent then the html will be displayed in a Div in the html called “LeftContent”. Something like this plugin (http://weblog.fairweb.fr/plugins-wordpress/fw-subpageinadiv-spiad/) just with the twist that you can define your content areas yourself.

    - I think it would be great with a plugin that let’s an editor edit e.g. the footer himself. I am thinking reusable content/macros here. Think of it, if you could define a macro called ##Footer and connect that to a hidden page, then you could just put in ##Footer in the template and the editor could edit the page and the footer would be updates automaticly.

16. Ryan on: March 25th, 2008 at 9:46 pm

    Dennis - Yep, I have a concept like that churning through in my head at the moment. Most of that can be controlled by the theme though, you don’t need a plugin for it.

    I think it can be done a little less complicated than your suggestion above though and could be taken a step further by allowing news posts with an RSS feed.

    If you take a look at http://dunedinicehockey.co.nz/dihl/ you can see how I’ve added a news feed down the right hand side of the page. That is generated via a WordPress category, although the page itself is not actually a category. I plan to offer that feature as part of a future CMS style theme along with a static page type content system like you have suggested.

17. Ryan on: March 25th, 2008 at 9:48 pm

    BTW, I have an RSI problem right now so may not be able to do some of this for a few weeks sorry.

18. Dennis on: March 25th, 2008 at 10:26 pm

    Sorry to hear about the RSI. I am a newb on WP, so I would love to hear how you would integrate two pages into each other. Maybe you could mail me?

19. JamieB on: March 26th, 2008 at 9:50 am

    Thanks Ryan, This looks excellent. It definitely only works in wp 2.5 though ?

20. Ryan on: March 26th, 2008 at 6:45 pm

    Version 1.2.2 has been uploaded. It contains a small fix for the bug which Dennis reported below.

    Dennis - I’ve added a credit in the plugin for you. If you have a link/last name you want on there just let me know and I’ll add it.

21. Ryan on: March 26th, 2008 at 6:49 pm

    JamieB - yep, definitely only works on WordPress 2.5. The new version of WordPress features a totally new admin panel, so if you try to activate with that I’m not sure what will happen - possible nothing, possibly you will get a big mess, I’m not sure. At any rate, I know it will not work for sure.

    I originally hacked up the admin interface for my own purposes, but I never turned it into a plugin. So when I realised my old hacked up files wouldn’t work anymore I decided to turn it into a plugin. My old route was pretty dodgy as it was as I rarely upgraded my WordPress installs as I was always concerned my hack might break each time. The new plugin route is unlikely to ever break on upgrading unless there is a major change to WordPress. And with a bunch of other people using it I have far more motivation to keep it updated

    PS: Occupational nurse at work told me keep typing till it hurts (almost), hence am back fixing the bugs early

22. Ryan on: March 26th, 2008 at 10:00 pm

    Version 1.2.3 has now been uploaded. I discovered a few more bugs as some of the options I had added couldn’t work as WP editors don’t have access to them, ie: themes, plugins, widgets etc.

23. Ryan on: March 26th, 2008 at 10:48 pm

    Oops, I forgot to fix the first bug that Dennis pointed out. So I’ve now uploaded Version 1.2.4.

24. Dennis on: March 27th, 2008 at 9:45 pm

    Hi Ryan

    After the latest update, my dashboard looks kinda weird, have a look: http://ornskov.dk/Dashboard.jpg

    You don’t have this?

25. Ryan on: March 27th, 2008 at 11:02 pm

    No I don’t have that. I downloaded a copy from here, unzipped and wrote over my old files and I still don’t get that.

    Is it possible your browser/ISP is caching the CSS file?

26. Ryan on: March 27th, 2008 at 11:06 pm

    I downloaded the copy in the WordPress repository and it isn’t doing it either.

    Is anyone else having this problem?

27. Zero Dominance - Running websites the well-rounded way » Blog Archive » The Simple CMS Wordpress plugin on: April 1st, 2008 at 12:27 pm

    […] Here’s the plugin from Ryan Hellyer’s own site. […]

28. JamieB on: April 2nd, 2008 at 12:36 pm

    I have a similar look to the dashboard as shown by Dennis eg. With the Dashboard, New page & manage bullet points. This is’nt with the latest version though, I will update soon and check then. No big problem though.

29. Ryan on: April 2nd, 2008 at 12:41 pm

    Hmm, that is weird. Not much I can do unless I can replicate it though.

    If it still does it with the latest version, it would be very handy for me if you could save an entire copy of a page with the problem (including CSS) so that I can see exactly what is going on. There is very little I can do with an image if I can’t replicate the problem.

30. JamieB on: April 2nd, 2008 at 1:32 pm

    I will update tomorrow and let you know. If the same thing is happening I’ll save the page so you can have a look at it. Cheers again though for this plug-in. I can see this being perfect for a job I have lined up.

31. Ryan on: April 2nd, 2008 at 3:54 pm

    Thanks JamieB

32. JamieB on: April 3rd, 2008 at 9:51 am

    Hey Ryan, Today I downloaded your plug-in again and wordpress 2.5 and did a fresh install of everything. The bullet points are still there in the editors menu (not admin though). If it is helpful to you for me to do a screengrab and send you any files let me know. Jamie.

33. Ryan on: April 3rd, 2008 at 12:00 pm

    JamieB - What I need is the HTML for the page. If you could view the page source (ctrl+U in Firefox) and email the text to ryanhellyer@hotmail.com that would be very handy!

    Thanks for the help

34. Ryan Oz on: April 11th, 2008 at 7:41 am

    thanks for the plugin.
    How difficult would it be to add “Post” to the menu?

35. Ryan on: April 11th, 2008 at 9:39 am

    Ryan Oz - Adding post to the menu would be very easy. The question is … why?

    If you added post, wouldn’t it just be like a regular WordPress admin panel?

    I might add that feature as an option in the future if others request it. I’m not sure when (if?) that will be though. If anyone desperately needs this feature, flick me a message via my Contact Form for pricing to have it done immediately.

36. Ryan on: April 11th, 2008 at 10:53 am

    JamieB - I got your email with the HTML. I changed the stylesheet URL’s to point to real stylesheets (were pointing to your local install) and it worked fine for me.

    I test in both Firefox 2.0 and IE 7 with no problems.

    If you are still having these problems. Perhaps try saving the entire page, including the stylesheets, graphics, images etc. You can do this by clicking “Save Page As” and choosing “Web Page, complete” as your file type and send it to me.

37. Ryan on: April 11th, 2008 at 4:37 pm

    JamieB - I’ve received your latest email with most of the files.

    However, the file which should be labelled wp-admin.css was labelled as wp-admin.htm.

    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="wp-admin.htm“>

    That wp-admin.htm file contained the following code:
    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>404 Not Found</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Not Found</h1>
<p>The requested URL /wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ryans_simplecms/wp-admin.css was not found on this server.</p>
</body></html>

    I think what has happened, is that the wp-admin.css file has not been uploaded to the server. And when it wasn’t there, whatever program you used to save the page, created an error page which replaced the original CSS file. Or at least that’s the only explanation I can think of.

    Try reinstalling the plugin and I think your problem will be solved. Make sure you download a new copy first in case there was something wrong with your original download.

38. Kevin Paquet on: April 13th, 2008 at 5:24 pm

    Thanks for this great plugin, I will make use of this on a blog where I’m not the only one who’s writing (since on my personal blog, I can handle the present admin interface) but these new blogging friends of mine seem to get lost of the present admin interface, so this would serve as very helpful, thanks again!

39. Ryan on: April 13th, 2008 at 8:06 pm

    Kevin Paquet - Glad to hear you like the plugin. Although I’m not sure I see any use in it for you as it is designed to be used for non-blog sites. If you install the plugin, your users wont be able to make blog posts anymore as those options will be removed.

    Unless of course you are just wanting them to edit the static pages as this is what this plugin is designed for - it removes everything which doesn’t help in editing static pages.

    I took a look at your site, it is nice to see you use SMF forums too! I also do custom integrations of WordPress and SMF forums if you are interested. The DIHA website is a good example of this. Get in touch via me Contact Form if you are interested. I also do custom SMF integrations for non-WordPress sites too, Go Day Care is a good example of this.

40. Ryan Oz on: April 14th, 2008 at 6:25 am

    “If you added post, wouldn’t it just be like a regular WordPress admin panel?”

    Well, a lot of the sites I design will usually have a
    “news & updates” section on the front page, and I have
    been setting it up so the clients use ‘posts’ as the way for updating that section, and ‘pages’ for updating any other content on pages. I just initially figured that was the ‘right’ way to set it up since the “news and updates” seemed more like a ‘post’ type of deal than static page content. But I don’t deal with any comments or all that jazz.

41. Ryan on: April 14th, 2008 at 9:25 am

    Ryan Oz - I haven’t checked, but I suspect if you turn off commenting in your settings panel (blog wide) that the commenting features within the other areas of the panel will disappear (I could be wrong though).

    I’ll consider that as an option in a future release though. A simplified news button instead of a blog post button would make some sense. That would definitely be an option though, not available by default.

42. Mike on: April 14th, 2008 at 5:50 pm

    I second Ryan Oz’s request to have post as an option!

    A lot of people want to blog, but get confused with all those options in the typical wordpress menu. And they’re not interested in writing pages, just posts.

    Great plugin overall - just needs that post option to be truly useful for me personally.

43. Ryan on: April 14th, 2008 at 6:53 pm

    Mike - Okeedokee then. I’ll make sure I can incorporate that into a future release. I’m quite busy right now though so am not sure how soon that will be.

44. Jason Shipley on: April 14th, 2008 at 7:36 pm

    I think i have the wrong developer.

45. Ryan on: April 14th, 2008 at 8:50 pm

    Jason - I don’t understand any of your comments.

    What is wrong with your developer and what does it have to do with the Simple CMS plugin?

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