It contains the extra features requested:

• Order the pages yourself by using the Page menu order feature.
• Put a link into into the menu for you blog.
• Works with javascript turned off.
• Make the the parent of a drop down menu clickable or not.
• Find out more at my original post.

Enjoy!

• Create a navigation menu with drop down menus for you Wordpress blog
• Slick JQuery animated sliding down for menus and fading out.
• Works with javascript turned off.
• Auto highlight of the current page you are are on.
• New features in v.02
• Add a link to your blog to the navigation menu.
• Arrange the order of the page to suit your needs.
• Parents pages can can be either links to pages or not if required.

I wrote this plugin to provide my wordpress blog with a navigation or menu that provides drop down menus or sub navigation menus where you need them.

This plugin uses the cross browser JQuery javascript framework for the sliding down menus and JQuery is installed with the plugin.

Each ‘Page’ of your wordpress blog becomes a link in the new navigation bar. Pages that are ‘children’ populate the drop menu of the parent ‘Page’.

For example. You might have a page titled About. You can then set or create pages such as contact us, team, location or whatever and set the parent of each of these pages to ‘About’.

In your new navigation menu hover over the ‘About’ link and a dropdown menu containing contact us, team, location appears.

I’ve tested this on Wordpress version 2.31 and above. It will not work on version 2.0.x as these version does not support the concept of parent and child pages.

Try out the Demo

Installation

Download wp_jquery_dropdownmenu plugin here

Simply unzip the wp_jquery_dropdownmenu.zip and copy the wp_jquery_dropdownmenu directory into your ./wp-content/plugins directory.

Login to the WordPress Admin Interface and enable the PlugIn in the PlugIn section.

Next put the tag below somewhere inside one of your wordpress template files.
That’s it.

Usage

Example:
Insert this somewhere into one of your templates, eg header.php

<?php
echo wp_jquery_dropdownmenu(2, “Blog”,1, 0);
?>

This is the default dropdown menu configuration. If you would like to learn about how you can alter your dropmenu further please read the following:

There are four settings to consider.

The first value(2 in the above example):
0 – does not put a link to you blog into the dropdown menu.
1 – Put a lnk to your blog on the left hand side of the dropdown menu.
2 – put a link to your blog in the right hand side of the navigation menu.

Second value (”blog” in the above example):
If you would like a lin to you blog to appear in your dropdown menu. Put the text here. In the above example “Blog” is used and will probably do for most people.

Third value (1 in the above example):
0 – pages will by sorted by their ID
1 – pages will be arranged accorded to their menu order. The menu order can be set in the pages section of your wordpress blog.

Fourth value (0 in the above example):
0 – if you would prefer the ‘parent’ of a dropdownmenu to be unavailable for clicking.
1 – if you would prefer the ‘parent’ of a dropdownmenu to to click to it’ page.

Further notes

You can style the css by editing the files styles.css in the plugins/wp_jquery_dropdownmenu folder

Comments, questions or suggestions most welcome!

Enjoy.

I’ve added two enchantments:

• Updated the version of JQuery from 1.0.3 to 1.2.1
• Added support for wordpress blogs that do not reside in the root directory for a domain. For example, the previous plugin would work if your blog lives at www.mylovelyhorse.com but not www.mylovelyhorse.com/blog/. Now it does.

Download here

Enjoy!

Three ‘core’ JavaScript APIs are provided:

LocalServer A local cache html, JavaScript and image files. Also provides mapping from on-line URLs to off-line URLs.

Database Google Gears comes with an SQLite database which is accessible via the Database API.

WorkerPool I have not used this, but the Google Gears description states, it can “Make your web applications more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously”.

I’ve put together an example which uses the LocalServer and Database JavaScript APIs.

Try out the Google Gears Example using the Digg API

Try out the following steps

• You’ll be asked to install Google Gears first, if you don’t already have it installed
• Fetch some Digg story titles from the drop down list, these story titles are saved into a local database provided by Google gears on you machine.
• This is where the magic happens! On the right hand side click capture.
• The document is now captured and available for off-line browsing. Go ‘off-line’, so in Firefox click ‘File’, ‘Work Offline’.
• View the URL again, and low and behold you will see the same web page even though you are Off-line. You’ll also notice a list of the titles that you had fetched before you went off-line.
• You can Erase the the document from Google Gears with the ‘Erase’ button too, and empty the database with ‘Empty’ if you wish.

And that’s that! Two out of three of the Google Gears demonstrated. Remember to put your browser back on-line when you’re done.

A couple of caveats

• Google Gears does not do server side scripting. The functionality that you wish to make available off-line must be implemented via JavaScript.
• Adding Google Gears functionality to an existing web application will require additional code in your application. How much code depends on the level of off-line functionality you want to achieve. You will need to insert logic into your app to check it’s off-line/on-line state and to tell it what to do if it’s off-line as well as when it’s on-line.

It came in handy for me when I was completing a master’s thesis at DCU. For part of our project we needed to parse incoming email and MMS mobile phone messages and extract the contents and attachments. This user generated content we received from the 3G mobiles phones (sponsored by 3Ireland, thanks!) would subsequently create a presentation. a dynamic story board of user experience of you will. The SIMSI moblog code helped us to understand how to achieve this collection part of the project.

While working with the script I added support for 3GPP mobile video and fixed some email date formatting issue.

Unfortunately I did not hear back from Marc Rohlfing , the original author of the script when I tried to contact him via email. Recently the link to http://www.rowlff.de/simsi went dead.

So I’m putting this up here as there may be others out may benefit from it as we did.

Short description

It’s a blog script an you can update by sending email/MMS messages from your phone(or not) to your email address.

Long Description

You send email/MMS messages containing text/images/video from your phone to a designated email address.

The moblog script will open that mailbox, extract the messages and save the attachments. The messages and attachments save saved into an xml file and a webpages containing the messages is presented in the browser.

Install

Extract and copy the directory containing the script to your webserver.
Download

Configure

In the index.php set following:

$MAIL_SERVER = “mail_server_here”;
$MAIL_USERNAME = “your_email_username”;
$MAIL_PASSWORD = “your_email_password”;

That’s it.

Now send a MMS to the email address. And browse to the location of the index.php

Happy moblogging!!

Scenario

I needed to set up 30+ users and blogs in Movable Type. I was faced with the prospect with spending all day doing this manually though the Movable Type interface. I would need to create the blog, then create the user than assign the user to that blog. Clicking and filling in several forms per user/blog. I would then need to repeat this 30 + times.

Instead I wanted to automate the creation of the bunches, batches or a multiple users and blogs in one go through PHP scripts. This is the result.

Conclusion

So if you have a group of user and blogs you would like to create in Movable Type 3.34 or 3.35 you can use this set of script to speed up the process. You can create up to 5 users/blogs per go in the current version of this script.

Backup

This is a mandatory step as the script inserts directly into the Movable Type database.
Back up your MySQL database. See here for instructions.
Back up you Movable Type files in the cgi-bin directory just in case.
Back up your Movable Type blog directories.

Install

Download files
Copy the MTBatchBlog directory to your web server.

Configure

Edit the config.php.

$dbhost = “localhost”;
$dbuser = “enter_your_mt_database_username”;
$dbpassword = “enter_your_database_password”;
$db = “Enter_name_of_your_mt_database”;
$sysadminemail = “enter_your_email_address”;

How to use

Go to http://your_url/MTBatchBlog/index.php
Log in with the username and password you put into the config.php
Next fill out the forms for each user/blog pair. It needs the same info as you would normally input when creating users and blogs through the normal Movable Type interface.

Warning

This set of scripts is provided as is. Use at your own risk. It has worked fine for me though.
I recommend you remove the MTBatchBlog directory from your web server when finished.

Good luck

Any comments, question or suggestions email me
If people would like to see additional features and support for newer versions of Movable Type please email me.

The eTicketStats add-on provides info and graphs and charts of the number of tickets submitted/closed per month, per week, tickets per category, ticket response/closing time etc.