A number of new features have been added including customisable labels and titles, post counts, excluding taxonomies and support for custom taxonomies.

Usage

<?php chainselect_getcategories( $tax, $level, $titles, $labels, $btn_text, $exclude, $count ) ?>

Parameters

$tax

(string) (optional) The taxonomies to retrieve terms from. Default: Category

$level

(integer) (optional) The amount of levels of child terms to return. Default: 1

$titles

(array) (optional) Titles for the first select option in each level – Must be the same number of array elements as $level. Default: array(‘Please select…’)

$labels

(array) (optional) Labels for each select element – Leave blank for no labels. Default: ”

$btn_text

(string) (optional) Text for submit button. Default: ‘Submit’

$exclude

(string) (optional) Exclude taxonomies by id – comma seperated string of id’s. Default: ”

$count

(integer) (optional) Show count of posts for each term. Default: 1

Examples

Show 3 levels of terms with custom labels and titles.
Syntax:

<?php chainselect_getcategories( 'category', 3, array('Select Country', 'Select County', 'Select Town'), array('Country', 'County', 'Town') ) ?>

Show 2 levels of custom terms with custom titles and no term count and excluding terms 6 and 9.
Syntax:

<?php chainselect_getcategories( 'location', 2, array('Select Country', 'Select City'), '', '', '6,9', 0 ) ?>

Details

Important information if you are upgrading from an old version of this plugin, DON’T!

I can’t stress enough that this plugin has been re-written from scratch and is in no way backwards compatible, so please delete the old version of the plugin before installing the new one.

Download

The new version is now available over on WordPress. Download Category Ajax Chain Selects now.

But my biggest issue with WordPress through its versions is its lack of customisation of the admin panel when you have it hand it over to an inexperienced user. Even when you setup someone up as a Editor they are still inundated with menus and functionality that they will never use.

This is where 3 must have plugins came to use, and allowed me to trailer the admin dashboard to my friends needs.

White Label CMS

The first plugin I discovered was White Label CMS. This plugin allowed me to use my own branding with WordPress, which looks more professional, and removes some of the unnecessary and confusing clutter from the dashboard and the menu system.

This plugin was great because it allowed me to remove all the menus that my friend wouldn’t be using such as the Links Menu and the Tools Menu. It also allowed me to customise the dashboard widgets and hide the ones that my friend wouldn’t be interested.

This is a great plugin that I recommend anyone who uses WordPress for their clients website to download and give it a try.

Download White Label CMS Now

Admin Menu Editor

The Admin Menu Editor plugin is what makes WordPress admin dashboard the most customisable. It lets you manually edit the dashboard menu, you can reorder the menus, show/hide specific items and change access rights.  This allowed me to give my friend the exact menu setup that was suitable for his needs.

Another great feature of this plugin is that you can create custom menus, so you can create menus made up of subpages of your choice. Why should I confuse my friend with loads of menu options when he only needs to use the Posts, Pages and Media menus.

I reckon everyone that wants to give their clients a simple user experience by removing the pointless menus has to give this plugin a go.

Download Admin Menu Editor Now

Capability Manager

Last but far from least is the Capability Manager plugin. One issue I found with WordPress 3.0 was that Editors don’t have the ability to create and manage menus. This is where this plugin comes in handy, in order for someone to access the menus page they need the ability to ‘Edit theme options’ which is not one of the default capabilities of an Editor.

With this plugin you will be able to change the capabilities of any role, add new roles, copy existing roles into new ones, and add new capabilities to existing roles. So I was able to give Editors the ability to ‘Edit theme options’ which gave them access to the menus page.

Download Capability Manger Now

Before and After

Here is the new admin menu that a created using the above plugins. As you can see I have removed all of the menus that an average user wont use and I have also created a custom ‘Menus’ menu to allow editors to create and modify the sites menus.

To begin with, I have to say a huge thank you to Duncan Mackenzie for providing the Xbox Live Data Service which powers the information in this plugin, because without his work this plugin wouldn’t have been possible.

There is a brief description on how this plugin works. As I meantioned above the plugin pulls in your Gamercard details from the Xbox Live Data Service using the  PHP DOMDocument::load function. Then, using the DOMDocument::getElementsByTagName function it pulls in the separate pieces of information it requires.

Once I had all the Gamercard details, I created the new Gamercard using semantic HTML and styled it with a seperate CSS file.

Ok, so enough of all the techy stuff, let me talk you through how you can add this to your website.

Installation

1. Login to your dashboard and under ‘Plugins’ click ‘Add New’.
2. In the serach box type ‘My Xbox Profile’ and then click ‘Search Plugins’.
3. Find the plugin in the list (it should be the first one) and click ‘install’ on the right hand side.
4. When the lightbox window opens click the red ‘Install Now’ button.
5. Once the installation has finished click ‘Activate Plugin’ next to the ‘Actions’ .

Changing Settings

Once you have installed the plugin you should see a ‘My Xbox Profile’ link under the ‘Settings’ tab in your admin dashboard. If you click the link you should see the page below:

Gamertag Details: In this section you need to enter your current Xbox Live Gamertag into the box provided.

Advanced Settings (Optional): There are currently a few additional settings that you can configure, I have listed them below.

• Show Recent Games – You have the ability to show or hide the ‘Recent Games’ section on the Gamercard.
• Recent Game Image Size – If you are displaying the ‘Recent Games’ then you can have the images in 2 different font sizes. (Please note if you are using the default stylesheet then this setting must be set to 32px)
• Use JQuery – I have added this setting to allow you to remove the JQuery files if you see them duplicated in the head section of your website.

Placing the Gamercard on Your Website

There are two ways in which you can add Gamercard to your website;

In Your Theme (Template Tag)

You have the ability to add the Gamercard to any part of your theme by using the following code:

<?php echo myxboxprofile(); ?>

In Your Post/Page (Shortcode)

If you don’t want to add it to your theme then you can add it to any post or page on your website using the shortcode below (without the spaces).

[ myxboxprofile ]

Additional Customisation

Now that you have installed and configured the plugin you will need to customise the Gamercard to fit the style of your website.

Within the plugin folder, you will find a folder called ‘CSS’ and in this folder you will find a file called ‘myxboxprofile.css’. This is the file that applies the design to your Gamercard once you have placed it on your website.

I have commented this file, so you are free to change the look and feel of your Gamercard to suit your own website.

Conclusion

I’m very pleased with this plugin and hopefully it will get a lot of use, primarilybecause it is extremely customisable from a design perspective. I am going to come back to this plugin and develop it further in the future, but I wanted to assess demand first.

I have a few ideas on the direction in which I would like to take this plugin, and here are a few of my ideas for the next version:

• Include the use of templates for different layouts of Gamercards;
• The ability to create custom templates;
• Utirlise more of the information in the Data Service.

If you have any ideas of your own then please do let me know and I will add them to the feature list.

Hopefully I have explained everything you need to know about this plugin, but if not then please do leave a comment below.

Download

The download is now available from WordPress.org, please feel free to give it a try.

PLEASE NOTE THERE IS A NEW VERISON OF THIS PLUGIN, PLEASE SEE Category Ajax Chain Select – Re-written from scratch : WordPress Plugin

This plugin came about because I couldn’t find a plugin that already had this functionality for WordPress, so I created a simple plugin to get me going. At present it is very basic; using a template tag below, you can place the chain selects any-where on the your page template, and then style it using CSS.

chainselect_getcategories();

The plugin also has the ability to pass the category level through, for example if you wanted 3 categories visible, you could use the template tag as (by default it will always show 2 category levels if no value is passed):

chainselect_getcategories(3);

I will continue to work on this plugin over time and add new features such as page codes, so that you can add the select boxes straight into your posts & pages. In the meantime, if there are any plugin developers out there that would like to help me develop this plugin, I’d love to hear from you.

PLEASE NOTE THERE IS A NEW VERISON OF THIS PLUGIN, PLEASE SEE Category Ajax Chain Select – Re-written from scratch : WordPress Plugin