Dashboard - Orangescale.NET / Thomas Arie Setiawan

§ WordPress Troubleshooting: WordPress Admin Area (Dashboard) Redirect Loop

Yesterday, I helped one of my clients with her WordPress-powered blogs. When I tried to find the solution — using search engines — I could not find any exact solution.

Problem overview

Okey, here’s the problem: When I tried to login to WordPress dashboard — not WordPress.com, but self-hosted — I always got these errors:

Redirect Loop
The browser has stopped trying to retrieve the requested item. The site is redirecting the request in a way that will never complete.

The browser has stopped trying to retrieve the requested item. The site is redirecting the request in a way that will never complete.

Have you disabled or blocked cookies required by this site?

NOTE: If accepting the site’s cookies does not resolve the problem, it is likely a server configuration issue and not your computer.

I’m not sure what caused this problem. I thought it was my browser (Firefox), but I got the same problem on other browsers.

§ Plugin Installation in WordPress 2.7

Currently, it’s easy to upgrade WordPress plugins from the dashboard for WordPress 2.5+ version. Compared to the old method, it’s much easier because we can upgrade the plugin using a single-click. Well, not a single-click, but at least you do not need to run any FTP software.

In the coming WordPress 2.7, it’s not getting easier for users, but also for developers. There will be a page called “Install Plugins” (the name might change). Here, we have a page displaying many related sub-menus about plugins like: Search Plugins, Upload a Plugin, Featured Plugins, Popular Plugins, Newest Plugins, Recently Updated Plugins. You can figure out what they mean, right?

For example, on the “Search Plugins” page, we can search plugins available from official WordPress Plugin Directory. We can narrow our search by “terms” (or keywords), tags, and also plugin author. We can also narrow our search using tag clouds provided. The search feature will give us list of plugins with the following details: plugin name, version, rating, and description. We can directly choose to install from this page. Very easy!

What makes it even better is that we can find out more details just like when we read plugin details from WordPress Plugins Directory. If we click on the plugin table row, there will be an inline popup providing information about the mode detailed description, installation guide, FAQ and also screenshot. The bottom line is that we can have plugin information without leaving the dashboard.

§ Movable Type 4.15 Dashboard Design

WordPress 2.5 did a major redesign on its user interface — also known as Dashboard. And, it looks great. But, this time, I will not talk about WordPress. It’s Movable Type. Right now, Movable Type is on its latest stable release (Movable Type 4.1 — it’s free). For the coming release (Movable Type 4.15) there will be some changes on its dashboard interface too. Also, there are some other new — and improved — features. Here are some highlights:

Single template listing. If we’re using the latest stable version, managing templates is easy, but we might feel not comfortable and easy in finding the template-related elements. For example, we want to know the URI structures for archive templates. We will go to “Design” tab, choose “Templates”, “Archive Templates” and click on the desired template structure options. The coming design will be more effective. On the “Design” page, we will be presented with a list of templates avaible in the system. All there.
Related to the first point, there will be changes on the navigation menu. We can work faster now.
Discussion should be better as Simply Threaded comment plugin — developed by Arvind Satyanarayan — will be included in the distribution.

Look at these screenshots (based on Movable Type 4.15 Beta 3):

For complete details about the coming release, please refer to Movable Type What’s New page.

§ Pimp your WordPress 2.5 Dashboard

One of the gret improvements offered by WordPress 2.5 is on the dashboard interface. Collaborating with Happy Cog studio, WordPress offers some great improvements. One of them is about managable widgets for dashboard. It means, we can manage what kind of ‘widgets’ should be presented on the dashboard.

Also, we can create a new admin interface theme. There are already some admin themes available like WP Tiger, Spotmilk, or Fluency. If we want to customize or creating our own admin theme, we can do it too. WordPress 2.5 introduces another option to have per user admin color scheme. The idea is “call another stylesheet into the dashboard”. And, it’s per user basis. So, every person in the system can have their own theme. Nice, eh? Read more about this if you want to create one. Anyway, by default we will have two color schemes. It’s Classic and Fresh.
Continue reading »

§ WPhone: Admin Interface for Your Phone

WPhone screenshot

WPhone (plugin page) is a plugin that gives you an option to replace the default admin interface with one designed for your phone. There are two versions of the mobile admin interface:

an iPhone / iPod Touch specific interface with full Javascript and animation support
a lightweight, simple version designed for all other phone types (no Javascript or anything else required)

Go to information page about this WPhone for more features. The screenshot page tells all about it. It seems that it is designed for use with the latest version of WordPress, but since standard API calls on the back end. So, I assume that it will also work for WPMU. Is it? Well, I haven’t tried it, but I will. Or, anyone tried it on WPMU environment?

§ Plugin Installation in WordPress 2.7

§ Movable Type 4.15 Dashboard Design

§ Pimp your WordPress 2.5 Dashboard

§ WPhone: Admin Interface for Your Phone

from dadio.tv

Elsewhere

Flickr photostream