So, I wrote another WordPress plugin, Featured Blog Authors. I am waiting to get it approved for the directory, but I am releasing it here for now. More info to come.

latest.zip

Since releasing the WordPress Admin Bar Improved, I have been looking around at the different WordPress Admin Bars that are available to see what I can do to improve mine. Well, I came across the Grand-Daddy of Admin Bars – the Admin Drop Down Menu from Ozh! I had read about it on some blog or another, and decided to check it out for myself. It TOTALLY BLOWS OUT (sorry Viper007Bond) anything I have ever seen before! Not only is it themeable (in a totally awesome sort of way – I mean c’mon, it has it’s own color picker!!!), but it has full API support for developers to add their own custom icon to the menu items created by their extensions!

Much like Viper007Bond, Ozh has NO PLANS on releasing this with front-end support – he does not want this to work if a user is logged out. I have other plans though. I am going to create another plugin that will detect which admin bar you have running (either Ozh’s or Viper007Bond’s) and pull it onto the frontpage if the user is logged in. If the user is not logged in, it will display a login form as well some relevant links for users when they visit your site.

I am not sure when this is going to get done – but I will post updates here.

If you want to help with development, please contact me here. If you want to help even more, you could send me a donation @ dilbert4life@gmail.com. Donation module to come soon.

There have been many comments over at Viper007Bond’s site requesting that he modify his admin bar to work site-wide, whether the user is logged in or not. He has repeatedly said that that was not the purpose of his plugin, and that it would not be supported. Well, I want to thank Viper007 for releasing his extension via GNU GPL, graciously allowing modifcations and re-releases as long as they are also GNU GPL. So that’s what I did.

I present to you the WordPress Admin Bar Improved. It allows for site-wide use, whether the user is logged in or not, and if they aren’t logged in, gives them a log in form, much like the one seen on WordPress.com or Blogger.

I will write up more later, but all you really need to know is that you need to unzip the files, and upload them to your wp-plugins folder. If you are installing it on WordPress MU, do the same thing, and then move the wordpress-admin-bar-improved.php file to the mu-plugins folder.

Enjoy!

You can always download the latest from here:
Latest.zip

Or you can get it direct from WordPress here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-admin-bar-improved/

Or you can install it from your Plugins->Add New page by searching for WordPress Admin Bar Improved.