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.)

WordPress provides a template tag, wp_dropdown_categories, that inserts a drop-down list (the HTML select element) of categories, where the value of each item is the ID from the database. This works fine if you are not using rewrite rules (AKA “pretty links”) - you can construct a URL using the value (?cat=[number]). However, if you use any sort of rewrite rules, this does not work. I recently converted my personal site, which uses the Pool theme, to utilize a JavaScript array to assist with displaying category pages.

Here's the code…

Edit: Code has been moved to this post.

This works for both “pretty” and standard links, as it uses the template tag get_category_link to specify the link.