Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category
Keeping track of what needs doing and what needs maintaining on your website.
August 5th, 2009 | Author: Peter
Table of contents for Todo
- Keeping track of what needs doing and what needs maintaining on your website.
The problems with running a large website
If you run a large website then you will know that it can be an administrative nightmare keeping track of what things need doing and what routine maintenance is required.
Specifically the problems are:
- Articles or pages get left unfinished and then forgotten about given your website an ‘unfinished’ look.
- Pages lose their lustre as the text gets older. They need to be updated regularly. This can be a headache if your site contains a lot of pages or posts.
- Often ideas may occur to you for improvements to your website but it is not convenient to implement the improvement immediately.
What is needed is a facility that runs within the Wordpress administration facility where the webmaster can manage maintenance tasks and ideas for improvements and additions.
I have had a look around on the Wordpress plugin catalogue but can’t find anything that fits the bill so I have decided the only thing to do is to write my own.
Requirements for the plugin
I have lots of ideas for enhancements down the line but I need ‘Phase 1′ to be ready as soon as possible so I can use it to help manage my sites.
- Hold as a MYSQL table with one record for each task. Each task will be known as a ‘todo’.
- Basic fields for a todo are TITLE, DESCRIPTION, IMPORTANCE, CREATION DATE, LAST UPDATED DATE, CATEGORY.
- Todos are either attached to an individual page or post or are ‘freestanding’.
- TITLE is a brief description of the todo.
- DESCRIPTION is a more detailed explanation of the todo.
- IMPORTANCE can be Emergency, Very High, High, Medium (default), Low or Very Low.
- CATEGORY is optional and will allow easier selection of todos.
- CREATION DATE and LAST UPDATED date are self explanatory.
- Page and Post edit screens should have a new section to allow listing, creation, amendment and deletion of todos (must use AJAX so main page editing is unaffected).
- New top level menu group to allow listing, paging, filtering and searching of existing todos.
- Full list needs the facility to allow creation, amendment and deletion of todos. Also, needs to be able to link to parent page (where appropriate).
- Options tag on menu group. Categories maintenance can go on here and we will add ’standard functions’ (this will probably be a later phase – It will allow things like ‘add a periodic text review every, say, 90 days’.
In the fullness of time I will add to the Wordpress repository but only after I have used it myself to perfect the functionality.
