Having starting using the fantastic Whistles plugin from Justin Tadlock over the last few weeks I realised there was one or two things that I would have loved to change, or add to the plugin. Therefore I went about doing this and created Whistles Utilities Plugin.
The plugin has two main features which are outlined below.
Whistles Content Widget
The widget provided with the plugin allow you to show a Whistles Group in a sidebar either as tabs or toggles etc. However I wanted not only this functionality but to allow users to show the contents of one Whistles in a sidebar. This would be very much like a text widget but users would be able to use the power of the post editor when writing them.
Relocate the Whistles Group Sub Menu
By default the Whistles plugin adds both its post type and taxonomy as a sub menu of Appearance in the dashboard. Justin himself has indicated that this is not ideal and I agree and wanted to find a way to have everything covered with 1 menu item.
Therefore the Whistles Utilities changes things so that the Whistles Groups menu disappears and the link to manage the taxonomy terms is placed above the page title on the edit whistles screen.
One of the other things that I wanted to change was to was the Post Type labels, so that rather than being labelled “Whistles” it would be called Snippets. I think that it would make more sense to my clients. I achieved this after a little help from Justin by using the post_type_labels_{post_type} filter.
https://gist.github.com/wpmark/9069976
However I abandoned this idea due to the fact that I could not find a way to change the name of the Whistles Group taxonomy in the same manner. Leaving this label the same would have left users a little confused I would think.
So there you have it, the Whistles Utility plugin. Download it from Github below and I would love to hear your comments/feedback.
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