List Drafts Widget

Updated, March 2010: Advance warning: I’ve finally got round to redoing this widget using the Widget API introduced in WordPress 2.8. Thought I’d better do it before a WordPress update breaks it. There will be an update here and probably a new post when the new version is available.

A long time ago[1], I unleashed on the world my first (and so far only) WordPress plugin: List Draft Posts. It’s a simple thing that lists the titles of any posts that you’ve started on but not yet posted. Simple is the only kind of coding I can generally manage, so it’s stayed simple, the only bit of sophistication being a form to control the layout it uses[2]. But it works for me, and it’s possible that one or two of the 239 people who’ve downloaded it from the WordPress plugin repository might be using it[3].

But it did lack one thing: it couldn’t be used as a WordPress widget. Well, there are ways of using a special widget to run a plugin’s function, but that’s not the same thing, is it? Having started to move my site to widgets, I decided to learn how to turn my own simple plugin into a widget, and started searching.

And that was a bit tricky at first. Some documentation I found assumed rather too much in the way of coding knowledge, and missed out some details that would be needed if you actually wanted your widget to work. But after a while, I found a post by Kaf: My Widget – example WordPress Widget. This, together with some changes suggested in the comments enabled me to get to work. After a lot of fiddling, tweaking, head-scratching, editing, re-editing and muttering, I managed to create a new version of List Draft Posts that is entirely widgety. Someone who knows how to code could probably make a version that would work as either a plugin or a widget, but for now I’m going to leave it as two separate versions.

As a standard widget, it doesn’t need much configuration – you can enter a heading to go above the list of posts, and a description for any draft posts that don’t have titles. It outputs its stuff in an unordered list below the heading:

 <ul> <li>A post I need to finish</li> <li>Another post I've started</li> </ul> 

I’m going to play with it a bit more, make sure it doesn’t break anything, then submit it to the repository. If anyone desperately wants it before then, leave a comment, and I’ll make it available by some means or other.

Update: You can now get the widget from the official repository: List Drafts Widget

[1] In internet time
[2] And that lacks a lot of sophistication itself
[3] Hi guys