Our blog list does exactly what it's told

Controlling the blog list

Now that the evocore has stabilised a tad we decided that it was time we brought AstonishMe out of the stone age and upgraded it to 2.x. which means that we have quite a bit of custom work to redo. At the same time we decided to convert a skin we'd been playing with a while ago. In for a penny in for a pound and all that. One of the main problems we had was with the core bloglist widget, we needed it to do more than what it currently does .... so we decided to recode it and make it a tad more *flexible* and then we threw in some new bits.

The main problems we needed to overcome were :

1. The ability to display public blogs , no problem the current widget already does this
2. The ability to display members blogs to logged in members
3. The ability to hide certain blogs from everybody ( including ourselves )
4. The ability to add each blogs description to the blog list
5. The ability to re-order the blogs to suit ourselves

It's always good to abuse the evocore

What does it do?

This is basically a direct replacement for the current widget except it comes with a fair few new settings. The main ones are the "Current Blog" and "Other Blog" settings which allow you to enter the html to use, either in the settings or from your skin, both settings have some replacement values to allow further customisation :

• $blog_url$ replaced with the blogs url
• $blog_shortname$ replaced with the blogs short name
• $blog_name$ replaced with the blogs name
• $blog_desc$ replaced with the blogs long description
• $blog_ID$ replaced with the blogs ID

What about the blog order?

Show members their blogs

To achieve the rest we decided it was time to abuse the blogs *notes* field .... mainly because we don't personally use it and it's one of the few fields that you don't end up fighting later. Ordering of the blogs is done by sorting them on the blogs notes field, so depending on what text you have in there depends on where they appear in your blog list ( ours start with "blogorder:1" "blogorder:2" etc ). If you happen to be one of the rare people that actually uses the notes field then just ignore the first line when yer reading them. Since we were abusing the notes field anyway we decided to abuse it a bit more. When the blog list is being displayed the plugin looks for the text "bloglist:hide" anywhere in the notes field. If it finds it then it skips ahead to the next blog in the list.

So where is it?

Until we finish recoding AstonishMe you can find the plugin here. Unzip it, upload it, install it, play with settings. As well as the other settings we threw a few in for Afwas although the rest of you may or may not find them useful. Once we have AstonishMe recoded you'll be able to find all our plugins on one easy page. As always, remember that this is a pre-release version of the plugin, so if you find any bugs or quirks let me know and we'll work at ironing them out.

¥