Theme authors (and most WordPress hackers in general) use "Template Tags" a lot (the bits like &lt?php the_something(); ?>. The main reference for them is the Template Tags Codex page, but after a wp-hackers discussion I found out about this nicely formatted Template Tag reference. All in one place and handy (not sure how often it is updated, though).

The unstable version of WordPress is now showing version "2.7-almost-beta" and you pretty much see most of what it's going to be. Basically… WordPress 2.7 is killing my plugins!

Absolute Comments probably won't get updated for 2.7 since most of its feature will be built-in. Almost 3 years ago I wrote the first ever Admin Drop Down Menu plugin and they'll be now available out of the box (definitely not as cool and usable as mine, but that's better than nothing)

All in all, this is good news. All the WordPress plugins I wrote were necessary to me because I had the feeling that WordPress was somehow failing at something (comment management or navigation for these particular) and I'm glad to see that the software gets more mature and improves its once shaky area.

For those who have tried and played a bit with the trunk version of WordPress lately, what is your favorite new feature?

Matt Martz has put up a very cool tutorial on segregating comments from trackbacks with WordPress 2.7 (something that has always been on my todo list, actually). Another handy read for theme authors.

WordPress 2.7 (release date: November 2008) will bring a load of new features, and most of the cool new bits will concern comment managements. On the public side of your blog, you will be able to show them threaded and paged without any extra plugin. Well, at least if your theme is able to do so.

Otto has written a very nice article explaining how to get a theme ready for 2.7 and the comment stuff. It's clean, detailed and goes step by step through all the new things. A must read for theme authors.

Two hours ago WordPress 2.6.2 was committed. It's yet to be announced on the Development Blog but anyway, this is a very urgent mandatory upgrade. Let's all salute the responsiveness of the core team: version 2.6.2 was released about 5 hours after a critical bug affecting 2.6.1 was filed.

Upgrade!

I ran into an interesting problem, facing what is certainly an HTML limitation that had somehow never really occurred to me. The thing is: when you submit a form with empty fields, empty values are POSTed, except for checkboxes and radio buttons which are not posted at all, just as if they were no such field in the form.

For instance, this form:

Submitting it, leaving empty values and not checking the checkbox, you would get the following $_POST array (notice the missing "checkbox")

In short: <input type="checkbox" name="field" value="something"> either gets submitted as field = "something" if checked, or doesn't exist if unchecked.

My problem was that I needed to process an arbitrary number of checkboxes while being able to know wether a checkbox was left unchecked, that is I needed to have a value for each checkbox in the $_POST array, either blank/off/empty or checked/on/whatever.

The solution I found was simple: before each checkbox, add a hidden field with the same name:

This way, there is always a value for field checkbox in the $_POST array: either "" if the checkbox was unchecked, or "on" if it was checked. I've uploaded a simple HTML form if you're curious to try: regular way, without the "special hidden" fields, or without the duplicate hidden fields. Submit the form with all fields left to empty and see the resulting $_POST array.

This simple yet effective and smart workaround was found by Cameron and I really love it. (And the image above is by Joey Rozier from a restaurant where you apparently can build your perfect burger, seems fun:)

This trick might or might now suit your need: for instance, client-side javascript serialization of the form could lead to something unexpected because of the duplicated fields. Also, this won't work with arrays of checkboxes (something like having multiple <input type="checkbox" name="field[]"/>). But for the particular case I had to deal with, it was very perfect. Love it.

A post that's not about WordPress but, hey, it's about Jazz, so I'm not that far :)

One of my sisters works for the (French) National Jazz Orchestra and so I was invited to one of their concerts, featuring their album named Close to Heaven: A Led Zeppelin Tribute. Oh my. I know nothing about Jazz and I'm only a moderate fan of Led Zeppelin, but this was an absolutely stunning and delighting experience.

Read a review of this album on All About Jazz. Listen to these (two very short) samples. Then buy the album! It's ethereal.

The WordPress Theme Toolkit is a tool that allows theme authors add an admin menu as easily as editing 3 lines, and it powers dozens of WordPress theme back ends.

Although everything still works fine and will probably work with all future versions of WordPress, I did not update its code in a while and, guess what, my coding skills are much better than two years ago, so there has to be things I can improve. I will soon give a stab at updating it, so I thought it might be a good idea to get feedback and possible feature requests.

If you're a theme author who has used or is using the Toolkit, what would you like to be added or changed? What would make your life easier and your authoring faster? If you're a theme user who is running a Theme Toolkit powered theme (ie there's a file named themetoolkit.php in your theme directory) and you know your theme author has a blog, feel free to contact them and point them here.