Media Categories 1.6 Beta

I am happy to see that so many people have found this plugin useful. I’ve had many feature requests, a couple code contributions, and plenty of bug reports. I appreciate it all.

It’s been over a year since there was an update to the Media Categories plugin, so I’ve been hard at work this past week adding a ton of new features. I’ve taken to heart as many feature requests and bug reports as I could handle.

Heres a detailed list of what you can expect in this new and improved version of Media Categories:

Improved Category Metabox: Filter terms as you type

Back in WordPress 3.4 and earlier, there were no metaboxes for taxonomy on attachments, so I had to roll my own fake metaboxes (“metafauxes”, I’ve started calling them). With the big push in WordPress 3.5 to improve the media modal, the need for that metafaux on the main editor page went away – but with it went one of everyone’s favorite features of this plugin. The “Searchable Categories” field, the input box that let users filter the categories that were showing, making the metabox easier to use.

In Media Categories 1.6, I’ve created a new set of custom metaboxes that bring back this feature! You can now type the name of the term your interested in and the list of terms in the metabox will filter as you type.

Drop-downs Filters in the Media Library & Media Modal

One of the most frequent feature requests made for this plugin has been the ability to filter items in the Media Library by taxonomy, just like you can on the Posts admin list. We’ll I’ve done that, so now you’ll have a separate drop-down for each taxonomy assigned to work with Media Categories.

Somewhat less frequent of a feature request, but still a great idea, has been to have the same ability to filter by taxonomy, but from within the Media Modal. This would be useful for obvious reasons to anyone with a large collection of images – especially for folks who’s website might happen to focus around imagery.

Media Categories 1.6 will include both of these new drop-down filters.

Sortable Columns in Media Library

Simple enhancement, but a frequent request. Click the header of the taxonomy columns to sort them by taxonomy. Not much to say about it except that getting it to work alongside the drop-down filters was pretty challenging.

Improved Media Modal “Metafauxes”

As I mentioned above, a metafaux is what I call a fake metabox – just a simplified version of the metabox meant to be used in places where the WordPress metabox framework doesn’t normally work. When WordPress 3.5 was released, it introduced the Media Modal/Media Manager. As a matter of chance, a bug was introduced. There was no way to distinguish between the media editor in sidebar of the Media Modal, and the main media editor in the Media Library. So my metafauxes were showing up in the modal, but they weren’t working.

I reported the bug, and they got it patched up quickly, but instead of taking out the metafauxes, I made them work – in the modal. However, they were kinda buggy.

I’ve fixed them up now, they look a little nicer, and they work a lot better – and just as before, they collapse to save space on the small modal sidebar, and you can filter as you type!

Gallery Shortcode Compatibility

To be honest, I should have known better. It was back in Media Categories 1.2 that I added the ability to select a taxonomy when using the “gallery” shortcode. This was very cool, and I think it became another big draw for people to use the plugin.

There was a terrible secret here though (thunder!), to make this work, I had to override the default WordPress shortcode (shreak!). This was bound to cause problems, and it did. I’ve received multiple reports of other plugins also interacting with the “gallery” shortcode, and when those plugins are on at the same time as this one – they don’t get along.

I figure most people dont have the conflicts (i think?) – so this plugin by default continues to modify the default “gallery” shortcode for the sake of not breaking people’s websites who already use it this way. However, it also creates a secondary shortcode called [media_gallery]

To stop the conflicts with other plugins, paste two line snippet of PHP into function.php file. This sets a property in the Media Categories object to false which stops my plugin from messing with the default gallery.

See the documentation for exact details on how this will work. I know its annoying that it requires code – but just you wait. An options page is coming.

Eventually.

Whats Next?

Bulk Editing – its the one feature request that I really wanted to get into this release, but it turned out to me more work than I had time for. I’ll try to make this feature a top priority on the next major release.

Options/Settings Page – I want to eventually eliminate the need for people to drop lines of code into functions.php to control how this plugin works. I want this settings page to simply let users pick from a list of all available taxonomies, and select which ones should be made to work with attachments.

Code Cleanup/Refactor – Given that the scope of this plugin has changed, I also want to reevaluate how it is written. It is currently a lot clunkier than I’d like it to be.

This plugin was originally meant to only be a tool for developers, to let them easily turn on metaboxes and associate taxonomies with attachments. It’s become more than that, and the users aren’t all developers anymore. That said, I’ll keep intact the control developers already have. I’ll probably even make it so the settings page can be completely disabled by defining some property in functions.php

Can’t wait? Wanna help?

If you’d like to beta test the plugin, please do so. Its available in the master branch of its GitHub repository here: Media Categories 1.6 Beta

If you have a bug to report, I always prefer that you do so on GitHub Issues, since its so much better than the WordPress.org forums.

Incorrect Datetime Bug Fix Updated – Version 1.1 Released

A user of the Incorrect Datetime Bug Fix plugin submitted a bug report last week. While the plugin was turned on the user was getting an error about improper usage of wpdb::prepare() in WordPress 3.5.

Warning: Missing argument 2 for wpdb::prepare()

This threw me for a loop, since its such a simple plugin that I’ve never had to change, I assumed that something changed in the new version of WordPress 3.5. I was all ready to submit a new trac ticket. As it turns out, it was my usage of wpdb::prepare() that had always been incorrect, if you are a developer and are interested in knowing more about the problem, read Andrew Nacin’s article on the subject. In the past WordPress simply wasn’t throwing out an error and that’s what was changed in WordPress 3.5. I found this by using git’s “bisect” feature, which is really great and I might write a blog post about it in the future.

As always I greatly appreciate but reports, idea submissions for my plugins, and any other feedback regarding the plugins I maintain. It is whats great about Open Source and it helps me validate its usage in the corporate world. The new version is now available for download. Please update to avoid these errors from being reported.

Media Categories 1.5 Released

Last week I finally released Media Categories 1.5, but I neglected to write a post about it. Most of the UI issues have been resolved with the Media Modal, however due tot time constraints I could only ensure the plugins compatibility as far  back as WordPress 3.3. It doesn’t break the site earlier than that, but selected taxonomy terms dont save properly. As of now, I have no plans to extend support to 3.2.x or before.

I do intend however on adding a few more features that I think are missing from WordPress 3.5 as soon as I have the time. The most obvious of which I will also try to get committed to core. Said enhancements include:

• Fixing the counter on the right of the attachment table – its supposed to indicate the number of media items per category but it does not count accurately.
• Adding a taxonomy filter to the attachments page – for most post types with a taxonomy enabled, the post types admin page shows a ‘View all categories’ drop down. This is missing from media in WordPress 3.5. I would also try to work some similar filtering ability into the Media Modal.
• There seem to still be some UI issues in the Media Modal when multiple taxonomies are assigned to a post type.
• I may create an admin interface in the settings area to allow admins to simply check from a list of checkboxes, which taxonomies (of all available taxonomies) they would like to enable for media.
• I may also include some simple functions for retrieving attachments by taxonomy. Although these would essentially be a simple wrappers of WP_Query or one of its wrapper functions, I believe it would serve as an example to developers on how to get started.

Take a look at how great attachments with taxonomies look in WordPress 3.5 by downloading Media Categories 1.5. Look out for some of these improvements I mentioned above in the next version, Media Categories 1.6.

One additional note: At some point in the near future I will update the plugins pages on this site,… I promise. However, please understand that the pages on this site are meant to contain the same information as the WordPress plugin repository does, mostly in the ‘Other Notes’ tab.

Media Categories 1.5 Beta 2

I have solved the UI problem in the modal that was holding up the release of Media Categories 1.5. However due to an additional bug reported to me on GitHub Issues, I did not get a chance to test the plugin in earlier version of WordPress.

The bug reported was due to an oversight on my part – in my rush to get this out the door, I had hardcoded much of the Javascript and CSS to work specifically for the ‘category’ taxonomy which I meant to go back later and fix – but I forgot. The Media Categories plugin has, since its inception, been intended to be used with any desired taxonomy. Thanks to GitHub user “stvwlf” for the bug report.

I believe Media Categories 1.5 should be fully functional for WordPress 3.5 at this point, but I wont release until I get a chance to test all aspects of it are backward compatible. If you would like to download Media Categories 1.5 Beta 2 ( zip / tar.gz ) now you can get by downloading the version specific tag in GitHub or you can get whatever is the most recent right off the master branch.

Media Categories 1.4 – Limitless Taxonomy

Yesterday a co-worker expressed a need to use the Media Categories plugin with not just a custom taxonomy, but with multiple taxonomies. So I spent last night at the office until around 9:45PM working on Media Categories 1.4.

Not to get bogged down in overly technical talk here, since I know that a lot of the users of this plugin are not developers. The main change in this release is that the class is instantiated as an object rather than called statically. All (except a few) references within the class have been changed from static references to objective references.

If you don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, thats ok. All it means is that developers can new create any number of instances of Media Categories checkboxes, for any number of taxonomies.

Example

Lets say you already use Media Categories for the “Category” taxonomy, but now find yourself needing to apply a new custom taxonomy – lets call it ‘genre’. All a developer needs to do is create a new object, and pass ‘genre’ as the parameter.

$genre = new Media_Categories('genre');

Thats it! As long as that taxonomy exists, and has all the proper “labels” set up, Media Categories 1.4 will add a second metabox to media with all the proper labels for pluralization and context.

Filtering a Taxonomy

Since the release of Media Categories 1.3, which was less than a month ago – developers have been able to change the taxonomy being applied to media by making use of the `mc_taxonomy` filter. This is still the case, but theres to it now that there might be any number of taxonomies applied to attachments.

If you simply return ‘your_taxonomy’ to the filter without any conditions, you will over ride all instances of Media Categories in use – so to avoid that, developers need to check the value of the current taxonomy before modifying it.

add_filter('mc_taxonomy', 'custom_taxonomy_metabox');
function custom_taxonomy_metabox($taxonomy){

if($taxonomy == 'category'){

$taxonomy = 'custom_taxonomy';

}

return $taxonomy;
}
Thats all, nothing too bad - just be sure to conditionally check for the specific taxonomy you want to replace.
Please let me know how this works for everyone. Enjoy!

Media Categories 1.3

On the heals of release of Media Categories 1.2, which added Gallery Shortcode support, I’m releasing Media Categories 1.3 which allows developers to change which taxonomy is being used. If you’re not a developer, this update won’t be of much use to you, as you won’t be able to write the necessary code to change the taxonomy. Thats not the case if you happen to be a developer making use of this plugin.

Developers can use the new ‘mc_taxonomy’ filter to change the taxonomy very easily. Take a look here, as I use this filter to change the plugin so that it used the Tags taxonomy rather than Categories.

add_filter('mc_taxonomy', 'mc_filter_taxonomy');
function mc_filter_taxonomy(){
return 'post_tag';
}

Of course, your free to use any Taxonomy, including Custom Taxonomies. So that sort of means this plugin is no longer really ‘Media Categories’, but rather ‘Media Taxonomies’ would be more appropriate.

Please report any bugs you find with this. There are plenty if ways that people configure their custom taxonomies and some bugs may crop up under certain circumstances. If they do, please report it here or in the WordPress plugin directory  forum for this plugin.

As a final note, I’d like to point out that just like the Gallery Shortcode feature in Media Categories 1.2, this new feature in 1.3 was suggested by a developer in the WordPress Plugin Directory forum for this plugin. I value the feedback I get from other developers and users, and so far I’ve received pretty much all positive, constructive feedback. Thanks to all.

Enjoy.