Ordering the bloglist the way you want it ordering

Order your bloglist

Finally you can control your bloglist directly from the admin area with this shiny new plugin brought to you by the AM Team. No longer do you need to hack the core files to achieve the results you require.

What does it do?

This is basically a direct replacement for the current widget except it comes with a fair few new settings. The main ones are the "Current Blog" and "Other Blog" settings which allow you to enter the html to use, either in the settings or from your skin, both settings have some replacement values to allow further customisation :

• $blog_url$ replaced with the blogs url
• $blog_shortname$ replaced with the blogs short name
• $blog_name$ replaced with the blogs name
• $blog_desc$ replaced with the blogs long description
• $blog_ID$ replaced with the blogs ID

Choose which blogs to hide from the bloglist

What about the blog order?

To achieve the rest we decided it was time to abuse the blogs *notes* field .... mainly because we don't personally use it and it's one of the few fields that you don't end up fighting later. Ordering of the blogs is done by sorting them on the blogs notes field, so depending on what text you have in there depends on where they appear in your blog list ( ours start with "blogorder:1" "blogorder:2" etc ). If you happen to be one of the rare people that actually uses the notes field then just ignore the first line when yer reading them. Since we were abusing the notes field anyway we decided to abuse it a bit more. When the blog list is being displayed the plugin looks for the text "bloglist:hide" anywhere in the notes field. If it finds it then it skips ahead to the next blog in the list.

Other abilities

As well as choosing the order of your blogs and which ones to hide you can also show logged in members blogs that they have access to, whilst not showing them to the general public. To do this you just need to untick the "display in public bloglist" checkbox in your blog settings and tick the checkbox in the plugin for "members". This effectively removes it from view unless you are logged in and a blog member. Another enhancement is the ability to add custom html before and after the bloglist so that you can keep all your menu options in one place.

Installation

Installation is a doddle, download the latest version of the Bloglist Plugin, unzip it and upload the am_bloglist_plugin folder to your blogs plugins folder. Then wander over to your Admin > Global Settings > Plugins Install tab, click the link titled "Install New" and select the plugin from the list of available settings. Thats it, it's installed and ready to be used in your skins wherever you want.