jonathanspence.com » Software

Xavin’s Review Ratings 1.4 Released

Jonathan — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 06:32:34 +0000

Nothing big in this release, just a relatively minor update to the xrrgroup tag. I released mainly to finally get a new version out there, and to bump the official compatibility version to 3.0. Version 1.3.1 works fine with the current releases but there was a WordPress shortcode bug introduced in 2.8 that sometimes makes the tags fail to render. If that happens just put spaces between the tags.

SharePoint 2007 – Showing Headings in Drop Down Menus

Jonathan — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:00:21 +0000

I have been fighting with the bad magic that is SharePoint recently, and one of the (many) problems I was having is that the design called for Headings to show up in the drop down menus, but we just could not get them to show up. It was very difficult to find information on this, mainly because there are so many options and configuration choices for a SharePoint site that few solutions are ever straightforward or even applicable to how you have the site set up. I never found a direct explanation of how to get Headers in the drop down (flyout) menus, but luckily I found the solution by chance on a page explaining something else.

The first step is to make sure your site is set up correctly to use drop down menus. This article provides a good explanation. If you are just using WSS 3.0 instead of MOSS 2007, you will likely have to look somewhere else, as I’m pretty sure this will only work with the full product.

Once your site is set up, it’s easy to build out nice looking menus using the Navigation page in the Site Settings, but the headings won’t show up on the drop downs, at least with a Team Site Collection, it may be different with some of the other site types.

These changes need to be made to the master page you are using for the site, and to the administration master page if you want it to show up the same on those pages.

Add the following to the top of the page, under the other control declarations:
<%@ Register Tagprefix="PublishingNavigation" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
Add this right under the first SharePoint:ASPMenu‘s closing tag:
Change the DataSourceID in the SharePoint:AspMenu control to siteMapDataSource1.

That’s it. Your Headings should now show up in the top navigation drop down menus.

Xavin’s Review Ratings 1.3.1 Released

Jonathan — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:44:46 +0000

Even though I hate it when plugins release too often, 1.3 had a bug that made error messages appear on the settings screen in some configurations. They were harmless, but I didn’t want them hanging around until the next major release. I also added a new option always_show_decimal that will add a .0 to whole numbers when displaying fractions. It’s false by default, but it can be turned on in the settings page, or set for individual tags.

Xavin’s Review Ratings 1.3 Released

Jonathan — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:44:48 +0000

I released Xavin’s Review Ratings 1.3 today. It’s mostly an update to clean up and self document the admin panel, but it also includes three new image sets. In addition, all the HTML that’s rendered by the plugin is now fully templated.

Rating: ★★¼☆☆

Rating: ★★½☆☆

Rating: ★★¾☆☆

Xavin’s Review Ratings Released

Jonathan — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:00:28 +0000

My second WordPress plugin, Xavin’s Review Ratings, was released today, and it is much more complicated and useful than my plugin for listing pages. It allows you to use a shortcode to easily add ratings to your pages that look like this:

Rating: ★★★½☆

There are a ton of options and full documentation on the plugin page.