jonathan stegall

I’ve made my first, hopefully useful for public consumption, plugin for WordPress. I’ve made a few other plugins, but none of them seemed to be really useful or customizable to benefit others.

About this plugin

This plugin uses the same data as the WordPress function wp_list_authors();. This function lists all of the authors that have posts associated with their accounts. See the Codex for more information about this function.

Note that you cannot use this function outside the WordPress Loop. There is another plugin that creates a list of authors outside the loop, and it works very well for this purpose.

My plugin, which is a widget that can be used in any widgetized theme, allows you to pick users and list them by inserting the widget into your theme. If you have users with posts who should not be listed, simply do not check their names.

If there is interest, I’ll expand this so that it can be used inside the Loop as well, but it seems to me that it is most practical for sidebars.

Why make this plugin?

This plugin is not an attempt to compete with any of the methods listed above, although certainly it does have some of the same functionality and could easily be expanded to have all of the same functionality. Its difference is that it allows for users with posts to be excluded from the list. There are a couple of situations where this could be useful.

• You have a blog with a large number of authors, and would like to feature a few of them. Maybe they are more popular, or have more posts, or are more regular posters. You can check these to be included in the list.
• On the flip side, you could have a blog with certain authors that you do not want to feature. You can simply leave these authors out of the list.
• You use your user pages to include users that have comments, instead of just users that have posts. The configuration of this plugin shows all users, regardless of whether or not they have posted or are assigned a certain role.

Download

Without further ado, feel free to download and try out this plugin.

Plugin:

Choose Authors From Registered Users (maybe it needs a better name).

Version:

0.5

Download

wp-chooseauthors.zip

So, at long last, I have taken a couple of tentative steps in designing my own website. Yes, this website. http://jonathanstegall.com. Typically, I don’t blog about projects until they are finished, but I’m thinking I’d like to blog my way through this one. To encourage myself, and document the reasons that I do certain things and do not do certain other things, and so on.

History of jonathanstegall.com

This site has existed since I was in art school and had to create a portfolio for myself. I did so. It was not one of my best sites. It wasn’t a horrible site, but it certainly wasn’t very good. The best part about it was the fact that the entire thing (a Flash site) was controlled through ActionScript: the colors, background images, content, animation, etc. Which was fun.

Anyway. When I moved to Atlanta and got a job, I didn’t see the need for a portfolio. I don’t have a whole lot of free time, and typically I have a lot of things that I would like to be doing and don’t have time to do them. Thus, freelance isn’t a high priority, and I don’t have a whole lot of need for a portfolio. So, I turned http://jonathanstegall.com into a blog.

I enjoy blogging. I have opinions about almost everything, and I like to share those opinions. It helps me think, it helps me grow, and it even gets me a bit of random traffic from Google and Technorati and so on.

Where to go from here

So, this site is currently built in WordPress. I like WordPress. I used it a bit in art school, and have used it a bit since then on other sites. I enjoy building themes, and working with the code. I know php well enough, and enjoy it well enough, to do what I want with it. It’s extremely customizable, and extremely powerful if one knows how to make it powerful. At this point, the site is using the default WordPress theme. I haven’t changed it, mainly to motivate myself to, whenever there was time, get busy and create something for it.

Here is where it gets difficult. Designers are often their own worst clients. I have had some odd clients, but I have to agree: I am the worst. It takes me forever to know what I want, I’m rarely satisfied, and I always think I could do better. This is also part of the delay, and it’s part of the reason I want to blog my way through the process. I want to see if I emerge as a satisfied, or even close to satisfied, client of myself.

First steps

I started in a sketchbook. I like to begin websites with a sketchbook. I sketched out a basic layout and structure, and a small navigational structure. When I design layouts for WordPress, I do not treat them as though they are WordPress layouts. They are websites. They don’t need to look like they are made in WordPress, necessarily.

Then, I moved to Photoshop, and started a grey box layout. So far, so good. But then I started playing around with some colors. And that’s where I started to be a bad client. I’m not yet satisfied. We’ll see where this goes.

I haven’t had a chance to post on this yet, but the new version of the Underground Railroad went live last week, just before my wife and I left for Cornerstone (which, I hope to write a couple of posts about).

It’s important to note that this new site isn’t what you would call complete. New features are in the works for both long and short term development, and the site is built in such a way that it is easy to add new features and new content.

About the Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad is an organization that seeks to network ministries that work with underground and alternative subcultures. At this time, I know of connected ministries in the United States, Canada, and several countries in Europe. I believe there are also ministries in Asia and South America that will be added in the near future.

This illustrates the fact that underground culture is worldwide, and that God is doing things in the underground worldwide. Dissatisfaction with the mainstream is worldwide because something of a mainstream is worldwide, and there’s a unity that can be found in that.

About the website

The website of the Underground Railroad is something I’ve been privileged to be a part of since 2002, when a friend introduced me to it. This new version has been in the works for some time. Over a year, at least. For most of my time in college, I was married, working fulltime, and attending school fulltime, and didn’t have as much time to work on awesome projects like this. Since I finished college in December, my freetime went up a bit and I was able to finish the site.

In any case, I was responsible for the design and development of the new site, as well as some of the new content. Other parts of the new content are still pending, but believe me when I say it’s better that the new site be up with pending content than that the old one have lived through another Cornerstone.

As far as design and front end structure, I feel that there’s a clean, dark look for the most part, and that it’s somewhat minimalistic. Part of this is intentional, and part of it is due to the slowness that often comes with receiving graphical material from so many different sources. I intentionally avoided the use of a lot of generic stock photography, but I do hope to include relevant photos as the site continues to develop and receive input. Front end structure is generated by the back end system, and is written to be valid XHTML 1.1, with valid CSS. I’ve never done a site to the 1.1 specification, and thought I’d give it a try.

The back end is written in PHP 5, with a MySQL 5 database. As much of the PHP is object oriented as my knowledge allows, which I’ve found to be more than I thought it was. While I can’t claim that this is an MVC Content Management System by any means, I feel that it is a cleanly coded system. This is by far the biggest project I’ve done with PHP, and has proven to be quite the learning experience.

What now?

Now, there are several other projects that will begin to require attention. Some are ministry related. One of the most important to me is, again, designing this blog. Let’s hope that begins soon.