Here is a short tutorial on how to create an additional WordPress menu that only shows up if a user is logged in. I use this technique to create admin front end interface menus for the most used tasks: writing and editing posts and pages, editing the current post , a direct link to the “manage” Section of the WordPress admin Interface etc.
Finally I got the new design ready. A dark color scheme this time, because I really like it how dark backgrounds play together with vibrant colors. I wrote some nice wordpress plug-ins to make my life easier and switched from mootools to jQuery.
I’m more than ever fascinated by the web and while i did struggle the last time I wanted to post on a regular basis, I will now try it again and hopefully succeed ;)
Since most of my visitors seem to be from non-German speaking countries, I use this as an excuse to polish my English, since its getting worse every day. So the navigation, the blog and my tutorials section shall be written in English from this day on; rest of the site will remain German… at least for now.
I for myself really enjoy using WordPress as a Content Management System, since most of the time its really easy to adapt to my needs. I usually use the different categories on my sites to display the various sections of the sites. For example, kriesi.at uses the category “tutorials” to feed the resources page and the “portfolio” category to feed my online portfolio.
This is easily accomplished by using the query_posts() function of WordPress which i won’t discuss in detail since the documentations are pretty comprehensive.
The problem I recently encountered is that the WordPress generated rss feed must be modified as well, otherwise it will display every post in each category. A user subscribing to my blog feed doesn’t want to be bothered with portfolio entrys, so I searched for a way to exclude categories from the main feed. There are basically two solutions I could find:
Since the article Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples was released on Smashing Magazine in February, I got quite a number of mails from fellow designers, who asked how to accomplish the sliding effect of my main menu. Even enough mails, that I thought about writing a little tutorial, but I must admit I am to lazy at the moment =)
Anyways, here are some tips for creating a similar menu: Head over to http://mootools.net and get a little familiar with this extraordinary Javascript Framework. In the demo section of the page, you will find a sub-menu entry called Fx-Elements which contains everything you need to build a so called “kwick menu”. By analyzing the HTML, CSS and Javascript you should be able to accomplish similar menus in almost no time.
Those who use Jquery (which is my prefered Framework atm, because of the steeper learning curve) can use the plugin, recently written by Jeremy Martin at jMars blog. I haven’t tested it for now but looking at the preview examples, it seems to work pretty well.
Hope I could help those of you who seek aid in creating a similar menu.
Update: I am using jQuery now, as well as jMars Kwicks plugin and it works like a charm ;)
Well, as I recently checked my Google analytics account, I saw a heavy increase of site impressions.. from Japan!
As i checked the incoming links it turned out that I was featured again, this time by the Japanese monthly magazine, “Web Designing“. It seems like someone over there liked my design, as well as the style of my CSS (at least i hope, could as well be a damning review, I’ll probably never find out)
All i could find out was: the article written by Miki Ofuji includes a CSS and XHTML analysis.
Well, enough with the bragging, just wanted to say hello to my Japanese Visitors ;)
If you like, leave me a comment and tell me what Mr. Ofuji liked or disliked…
PS: sorry about my poor English, it’s been a while since I last wrote a non-German article ;)
