KeganBall.net

I need to find a plugin that allows me to display a public todo list on the site.

Cleverness To-Do List
I googled ‘todo list plugin’ and the third listing is the ‘Cleverness To-Do List’ plugin on the cleverness.org site. http://cleverness.org/plugins/to-do-list/

I read the description and it seems to be plugin meant to be used by admins on a WordPress site but it also has a widget and shortcode that will allow me to put it on a page/post. So this would satisfy my need to have it displayed publicly.

So let’s try it!

I installed and activated the plugin to discover that it appears to have 2 options menus. One under Tools and one under Settings.

The options under Tools is the list itself. And the options under Settings is the settings for the plugin.

I didn’t see any plugin options that I wanted to change.

I need to know what the shortcode is so that I can place the list on a post.

After reading the shortcode descriptions on the plugin home page I was able to put together the string I wanted:
[todolist title="Todo List" type="table" priorities="show"]

After looking at it and playing with it for a bit, I don’t like that I can only have one big list. No categories or separations. I deactivated it for now.

WP Ideas
I installed and activated the plugin. The options is listed as ‘Ideas’ under Posts menu.

The plugin is getting an error. Deactivating and deleting.

Post Todo List
It placed an options menu item called Post Todo List under the Settings menu.

The options were very basic. It appears that this allows you to have a todo list for each post using the ‘ [post_todo]‘ shortcode.

When I clicked save on the options page it told me I needed to upgrade to WP 2.9.2. Since I really don’t have much going on with this site, I figured it shouldn’t hurt too much.

WordPress was giving me errors after I put in the shortcode. Deactivating and deleting.

List Manager
After installing and activating there is a Lists menu item under Posts.

When I click on it the Lists menu item it takes me to a page on my site and states that the page cannot be found.

I went to the plugin home page (http://www.navidazimi.com/projects/wp-lists/) and found that the plugin requires a file to be in both the plugin folder as well as the admin folder. I manually copped the one missing from the admin folder. When I clicked on the Lists menu again it works!!

So I click on Create New List.

I added a few items to the list. Seemed to go fairly smoothly. Now I need to figure out how to get it to show on my page.

I tried to use a long string of shortcodes:
<ul>
<list id=”1″ showlinks=”true” showchecked=”false” odd=”odditem” even=”evenitem” attribute=”count” attribute=”countchecked” />
</ul>

But it didn’t work. I got a ’0′ on the page.

In the end I settled for:
<ul>
<list id=”1″ />
</ul>

Now I have a todo list on my site so I can be reminded of what I want to work on and to share that with others.


In this series I’m setting up the categories for KeganBall.com by installing them here on KeganBall.net.

The first thing I to do is to install ‘Top Level Categories’. I want to make sure I start out right. I have decided that I don’t want the word ‘Categories’ in my path in the address bar. I just want www.keganball.com/software/wordpress/  This is to simplify things.

After installing ‘Top Level Categories’ and testing to make sure it doesn’t show up, by clicking on each of the categories, I noticed that when I click on the ‘Software’ category nothing shows up.

I’ve put the first part of this post into the ‘Software’, ‘WordPress’, and ‘Setup’ categories but it only shows up when I click on the ‘Setup’ category.

So if I want it to show up under all three I will need to do some more research to see if there’s a plugin to do that. Of course I should give it some more thought and see if maybe it’s better to only have it in the one child category.

Other than that minor question, the ‘Top Level Categories’ plugin seems to work just fine. It removes the word ‘categories’ from the path in the address bar.

As a part of Categories Customization Research series I’m going to set up a way to manage series of posts. So my goal here is to find the best plugin for the job.

I will install, test and report on each.

In Series
I installed ‘In Series’ and went to Settings>Series to adjust any available options. It seems to have some nice formatting options, but it’s not readily clear as to how to link the series together. I’m going to see if I can find more info on the plugin page.

After reading a little more about the plugin, I can see it works by selecting a series within each post. However after trying to add a new post to a series I couldn’t figure out how to add a new series so that I could add the new post to a series.

So I am uninstalling ‘In Series’.

Organize Series
I installed ‘Organize Series’ and went to Settings>Series Options. I read through the options and they are even more extensive than the ‘In Series’ plugin. They look like they have a good set of defaults so I’m just going to go see if I can get it to work for now.

I went to add a new post. When I expanded the Posts menu there is a new Manage Series menu item. So I clicked on it.

I created a series with the following:
Series name: Categories Customization Research
Series slug: Cat-Cust-Research
Description: Researching ways to use categories in a more flexible way. I want to be able to have a categories multi-dropdown menu at the top and have collapsible categories widget on the side.

I then clicked ‘Add Series’ and I was ready to go! I went to edit my first post in this series and went to the bottom of the post. I selected the radio button next to ‘Categories Customization Research’, entered ’1′ for the ‘ Series Part:’, and clicked ‘Update Post’.

When I go view the post it shows me a new box at the top of the post that tells me it’s part of a series and gives the titles and links to the other posts in the series.

There were a couple other plugins available. But after reading their descriptions the ‘Organize Series’ seems to be the best choice.