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Plugin for WP Plugin Developers: Show Current Screen Object

You are working on your fancy new WordPress Plugin and you want to incorporate some nifty hooks into the menu system, or you are trying to add some contextual help without overriding the existing help text. How can you find the id of the page to hook into?

Wonder no more. I’ve written a simple plugin to help you.

On the admin side, WordPress uses an object to store information about the current screen you are on. This includes the id, the action, the parent file, and some other miscellaneous and sundry items. This is information a plugin developer needs to hook into, but, as good as the WordPress Codex is, sometimes it can be hard to find certain things, especially if you are tapping in to an area that there just hasn’t been a lot of outside development. For me, this came while trying to add contextual help in the WP admin areas for my plugin WP-Members.

I wanted to add to the existing contextual help (that little help menu that pulls down from the WP admin header) for admin panels that WP-Members used, such as its own plugin page, but also the post and page edit screens, some of the settings screens, etc. For this, I needed “screen_id” of the screen/panel to pass to the filter for contextual help. Maybe I just wasn’t looking in the right place, but it seem that there really isn’t any documentation in the codex on this.

The screen_id is in a global array called $current_screen. So I figured I could dump the contents of the array on the screen to find the ids I needed. Enter the plugin. I did this as a plugin so I could turn it on and off as needed. It basically gets the value of $current_screen and uses print_r to dump the values. With the plugin I was able to add a little css so it would display in a box at the upper right of each admin screen. That way, as I browsed through the panels I wanted to hook into, I could get the screen info to apply to the filter.

[ Get the script ]

SEO Plugin for WordPress | Sponsored Plugin Review

By Chad Butler 5 Comments

This plugin fills a void in the SEO plugins that are available for WordPress. Most SEO plugins tend to focus on keywords, titles, and metatags. While those are important, one of the areas that is missed is how Search Engines rank your links based on how your backlinks are titled.

Google has an algorithm that filters for link spam and other search engines (including Google) look for keyword rich links. Your keyword rich post is not benefited when sites are linking to it with “click here.”

But how can you control the text that people use in linking to your site? SEO Link Rotator fills this void by giving you the ability to rotate the link text that people use when copying a link to your site. Much like social bookmarking plugins that provide a “link to me” type of button, SEO Link Rotator provides a button to provide a link, but it rotates through up to 5 possible sets of link text that you define via the WP admin.

Pros

This plugin is a snap to set up. And there is a free version that allows you to try before you buy. (The free version is fully functional, but does not allow you to set 5 possible links. It defaults the the post title.)

Not only is it easy to set up and install, it’s easy to start using. Once activated, it will automatically place a button at the end of each post, encouraging your readers to link back to you. No edits to your theme are required. If you are using the pro version, you can set your 5 possible text links on the post edit panel.

Cons

As a WP Plugin developer, I am generally a little more critical of plugins from both an operability standpoint and how the plugin is built and coded. The SEO Link Rotator plugin is pretty well written from a php development standpoint.

This is more nitpicky rather than a major flaw, but I’d like to see admin panel functions broken out to a separately loaded file rather than the main plugin file. While this isn’t a concern for someone running a blog that doesn’t get much traffic or is on a dedicated server, if you have a high traffic blog or are on a shared system, this is extra and unnecessary bulk that should be trimmed. I would suggest the developers consider breaking out the admin functions to a separate file that loads only if the user is an admin. This makes for a much more efficient plugin for busy sites.

Give it a try

Overall, I like the plugin. It is not an “also-ran” of the many social bookmarking/linking plugins out there already; ditto for the meta-tag SEO plugins. This plugin is unique, and as I said before, it fills a void in the the WP SEO plugin arena. Give SEO Link Rotator a try. With the free version, you can easily determine if this plugin is right for you.

This is a sponsored review for which I received compensation.

Problogger offers special November discount

By Chad Butler Leave a Comment

I’ve written about Darren Rowse and his 31 Days to Build a Better Blog course before. I think very highly of Darren, his book, and his course.

This month, Darren has been offering both the 31 DBBB course/ebook AND his new(er) book Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers for 25% off. But you MUST ACT NOW to get the discount! This is only for the month of November (which, by the way, ends tomorrow). The discount code is November25 (think 25% off for November). Enter this code when prompted at checkout to get your discount.

31 Days to Build a Better Blog

Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers

Both ebooks are regularly $19.95, but with the discount, they are $14.95 apiece. I recommend you get both – especially since they are not usually on sale!