Narwhal Microblog Plugin

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Last Updated on: 7th July 2019, 07:02 am

Description

Narwhal magically turns most themes into powerful microblogs. It is lightweight, simple, and it will take on your theme’s look and feel (you may need to tweak with your CSS). It adds a front-end new post area on your blog’s main page (or other pages if you so desire).

Narwhal started (version 1.0) as a simple text-area and tag field with no admin settings. Soon after creating Narwhal 1.0, I realized that someone else had already done something similar with more features. They built their plugin many years ago and called it Posthaste. The author of Posthaste is Jon Smajda. But, his plugin hasn’t been updated in many years and so it’s time for it to be revived as Narwhal Microblog 2.0. I did some tweaks to fix some code warnings/errors, but much of the code is repurposed from the old Posthaste plugin. Then it turns out; the Posthaste plugin is repurposed Prologue/P2 code (WordPress themes).

A few notes about the plugin’s behaviour:

In WordPress 2.7 and higher, you can select which fields you want to appear in the form and what pages you want the form to appear on. Settings are in “Settings -> Writing -> Narwhal Settings.”
If you leave the “Title:” field blank, it takes the first 40 characters of the post content and makes that the title.
If you leave the “Category:” box at its default setting it posts to your default category. However
If you have a category group named ‘asides,’ it will put posts with empty titles into the ‘asides’ category even if you do not explicitly specify the ‘asides’ category group in the drop-down. You can then style them as asides.
The included CSS is deliberately simple. If your theme already styles forms, it will probably inherit your theme’s styling. If you want to customize the appearance of the structured form, customize your CSS files.