This blog moved today from Jekyll to Hexo (and it's now open source as well). One of the final issues I had when wrapping up the conversion was how to handle categories and tags that do not necessarily have a slug that can be naturally derived from the name. Take the “C#” category, for example. The normal slug for that category would be c, which is an entirely different programming language; interestingly, “C++” will also normally get its slug as c.

Within Hexo's default _config.yml file, there are two empty items named category_map and tag_map; their comments allude to a mapping, but I could not find what the proper syntax was for those items. We hopped onto the Hexo Gitter chat and asked the question, and someone pointed us to this issue. To define a mapping, create an item under either the category_map or tag_map top-level item. The maps for this site, as they currently are, look like this:

category_map:
  C++: c-plus-plus
  C#: c-sharp
  .NET: dot-net
tag_map:
  c#: c-sharp
  .net: dot-net

As you can see by hovering over the links in the sidebar, “Programming > .NET > C#” ends up with a URL ending with /programming/dot-net/c-sharp/, which is exactly what we were looking for.

Version 2.1 of Daniel's DropDowns has been released. This fixes a problem introduced with the 2.5-series of WordPress - the output of the WordPress tag changed, so the search-and-replace portion that added a “Select Category” entry didn't work. This has been fixed in version 2.1. I also corrected a small bug that caused the first entry in the category list to be selected if a default wasn't specified.

It can be downloaded from the WordPress Plug-In Directory. Enjoy!

(UPDATE: This plug-in is inactive, as its functionality is now part of WordPress core.)

I have released version 2.0.1 of Daniel's DropDowns, the WordPress plug-in that provides category and archive dropdown template tags. It is available on its page at the WordPress Plug-In Directory.

This was a minor change - the auto-navigating lists added in version 2 needed a slight tweak. There wasn't a “select category” entry, so one could not navigate to the first item in the list without going somewhere else first. The category dropdown now has this entry, and is consistent with the archive dropdown.

Enjoy!

(UPDATE: This plug-in is inactive, as its functionality is now part of WordPress core.)

I have released version 2 of my category and archive drop-down plug-in for WordPress. It is hosted at the WordPress Plug-In Directory - you can go get it there. Following are a few of the changes that were made.

• Both tags now have only 2 parameters - the type of navigation and the text for the link or button. For navigation type, ‘button’ remains the default, and ‘link’ is still available. However, a third option of ‘auto’ has been added, which will render the list as an auto-navigating select box.
• The CSS parameters for the select and button elements were dropped. How these elements can be specified using CSS is detail in the top-of-plugin comments, along with an example.
• The usage examples in the comments now have an example of how to put the tag in a template in such a way that, if the plug-in is disabled, the template will still render. This could be done with 1.0, but I didn't give an example.
• I added PHP Documentor-style comments to both functions.

Let me know if you have any problems with it, or any ideas for other behavior. Enjoy!

(UPDATE: This plug-in is inactive, as its functionality is now part of WordPress core.)

I've created a plug-in that I'm now using on my personal site to provide the category and archive drop-down lists. It's called “Daniel's DropDowns”, and it will create drop-downs with either a link or a button to go to the selection in the drop-down, and a CSS class can be specified for the button and the drop-down box.

daniels_dropdowns.txt - Daniel's DropDowns 1.0 (UPDATE: This functionality is now part of WordPress core.)

To install it, download the file, rename it “daniels_dropdowns.php”, and upload it to your /wp-content/plugins directory. Then, enable it, and add the template tags to your theme. (The documentation at the top of the file lists all the template tags provided, and the options that can be passed to them.)

At Bit Badger Solutions, we maintain 64-bit builds for two software products - xine and the Lightning plug-in for Thunderbird. These are now shown under “Hosted 64-Bit Software” in the sidebar. You can also view links for each of the categories.

Lightning Plug-In (UPDATE: See this post.)

Category Link • RSS Feed

xine RPMs

Category Link • RSS Feed

Along these lines, there will hopefully be a new xine (1.1.7) coming soon - stay tuned!