St. Louis WordPress Users Group

Lately I’ve been thinking it would be good to start a St. Louis WordPress users group. I’d love to attend some of these and meet some other WordPress people in the St. Louis area. The idea of having a St. Louis WordCamp is also appealing, but I think it would be beneficial to find out how many people are interested in WordPress before investing the time for a WordCamp.

So who out there has a place to host such an event and would want to put it on? I’d be happy to help, but I’m not sure I’d be able to make it to every meeting. I wouldn’t want to be the point person, I’m just trying to get the ball rolling.

EDIT: I did come across a group on Facebook, the St. Louis and St. Charles WordPress Users Group. I signed up, but it doesn’t seem very active.

EDIT x2: I just found a meetup group for STL WordPress: http://www.meetup.com/stlwordpress/

WordPress 3.0 and Menu Dropdown Box

I’ve started to play around with WordPress 3.0 Beta 2 and the new menu system it has. While playing around with it, I thought it might be nice to include a dropdown box of menu choices on a settings page for a theme. So I made a function similar to that of the dropdown box for categories (wp_dropdown_categories). I called this one wp_dropdown_nav_menus.

function wp_dropdown_nav_menus($args = ''){
	$defaults = array(
		'echo' => 1,
		'id' => '',
		'orderby' => 'name',
		'order' => 'ASC',
		'hide_empty' => 1,
		'selected' => 0,
		'class' => 'postform',
		'tab_index' => 0,
		'show_option_all' => '',
		'show_option_none' => '',
	);

	$r = wp_parse_args( $args, $defaults );
	extract( $r );

	$tab_index_attribute = '';
	if ( (int) $tab_index > 0 )
		$tab_index_attribute = " tabindex="$tab_index"";

	$terms = get_terms( 'nav_menu', array( 'hide_empty' => $r['hide_if_empty'], 'orderby' => $r['orderby'], 'order' => $r['order'] ));

	if(! empty($terms)){
		$output = "";
	}

	if ($echo){
		echo $output;
	}

	return $output;
}

If you want to use this in your code, please change the prefix of the function from wp_ to something more useful for your purpose. Just in case WordPress comes out with a function similar to this one.

iPhone 3G Dropping Calls

Dear AT&T,

Enough is enough. You know there is a problem with the iPhone 3G dropping calls. Please fix it. I finally went through and did as the forums suggested, and disabled 3G. I shouldn’t have to do that though. I’ve been growing tired of your company and my family will probably be switching to Verizon once our contract is up.

Your loyal customer since 2001,

Eric

Piwik Analytics

Has anyone messed with Piwik Analytics? I just got it setup on thejudens.com yesterday, and so far it seems pretty slick. The one thing I like most about it is that the data is mine! I don’t have to share it with google! Right now we have both google analytics and piwik running on the server. I’m going to let them run and see how they compare with each other. I’m just kind of curious how close the results will be with the other. I’ll report back later and let everyone know.

In the meantime, you better go check out Piwik. It runs on php/mysql and you can most likely install it on your hosting account.

WordPress MU List Blogs

I recently had to make a list of all the active blogs for the university’s blog site running WordPress MU. Here’s the code to do so:

Blog Directory

You’ll notice the query is set to filter out blogs that are marked as archived, spam, private. Also, it hides the main blog from the list.

UPDATE: As posted in the comments by Brad, you can sort these in alphabetical order by the site name by using the following code:

Newsletter Converter 1.0.6 Released

Not sure if anyone has noticed, but the Newsletter Converter for WordPress has been updated to version 1.0.6. Hopefully this release fixes a lot of the timeout issues people were experiencing. You also have the ability to use cURL instead of php’s file_get_contents() function, which is apparently not enabled on a lot of web hosts…go figure.

If you are happy with it, feel free to buy me a beer (in the sidebar).