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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.

I have been getting into WordPress MU recently, and came across and awesome plugin, the WordPress Admin Bar, that I wanted to utilize for my site. However, one functionality that I wanted to add to it is the ability for it to be viewed on the frontend even when a user was not logged in. Well, I did some hacking, and came up with this. It only works if you have WordPress 2.8 or higher.

Here is my original comment to Viper,

Great plugin! I love it. I too, like many here, want to be able to show it even if the person is logged in or not, and give them the option to log in if they want to. Well, since WordPress 2.8, this is now possible by editing 1 line in your code and commenting out another.

For those of you who want to have it show whether the person is logged out, just comment out line 49 (the one that says if ( !current_user_can(‘read’) ) return;) and then edit line 436.

Old Line 436

<li><a href="<?php echo wp_logout_url(); ?>"><?php _e('Log Out'); ?></a></li>

New Line 436

<li><?php wp_loginout(); ?></li>

I was having some issues with my WordPress after installing WP-Cache and Referrer Detector together. None of my referring links worked correctly! Nothing would show up when I linked to my site from an external site, and it was quite frustrating. I automatically assumed that it was because of WP-Cache, so I disabled it. And sure enough, after that, Referrer Detector worked just fine. So I set about googling to figure out if there was a way to integrate Referrer Detector and WP-Cache, and was coming up empty for a while.

I eventually pulled up a post from the maker of Referrer Detector and found out that he CODED IT TO WORK WITH CACHING ENABLED! There is nothing you have to do to “hack it” to make it work. To get it working, follow the steps laid out below.

1. Install Referrer Detector.
2. Install WP-Cache (if it is not already installed).
• If it is installed, disable it, delete the caches, and the re-enable it.
3. Enjoy your new Referrer Detector Extension!

And Seriously, that is all that there is to it.

I bought my Apple Retail Snow Leopard Family Pack today and began upgrading my computers (Three laptops and two desktops). Everything went fine and dandy with the first upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard on the first laptop. No problems whatsoever.

One thing that I was worried about is three out of the 5 computers already had the Snow Leopard Developer Preview installed on them (the preview from WWDC 2009). I was not sure if this would present an issue when upgrading directly to the full retail version. So I gave it a shot, and the fact is that I can verify without any hesitation, you CAN UPGRADE without any problems whatsoever. Just insert the disk and follow the onscreen prompts.

I am assuming that this would be the same situation for Snow Leopard Server if you have that as well.

Enjoy!