The Ideophone

Sounding out ideas on language, vivid sensory words, and iconicity

Dashboard Post-it: leave notes on the WordPress dashboard

Dashboard Post-it is a simple plugin for WordPress 2.7 and higher that allows you to leave yourself or other authors a note on the dashboard. It is implemented as a configurable dashboard widget, so you can collapse it, move it around, and edit it as any other dashboard widget. It will accept plain text or (sanitized) HTML. Only users with the capability “Edit dashboard” can edit the note.

As of today, Dashboard Post-it is available for download at the WordPress plugin repository. Screenshots and installation instructions can be found over there.

I wrote the plugin for my own use. There are alternatives, but since some of them stopped working after the changes to the Dashboard in WP 2.7 and others are not widgetized, and since this is a much requested feature, I decided to submit the plugin to the repository.

mark

21 responses to “Dashboard Post-it: leave notes on the WordPress dashboard”

  1. Thanks for the plugin. Looks and works great. Two caveats though:

    First, it doesn’t seem to accept simple line breaks. It’d be great if it would do so and you wouldn’t have to use BR or P tags there.

    Second, it would be great if there were an option to always keep the editable field on. Since I generally just want to quickly jot down notes, it’s a bit of a drag to hit the configure button first and the submit button afterwards.

  2. Martin, I will look into the linebreak issue. Perhaps invoking wpautop would help; right now the widget is set up to expect HTML.

    As for always keeping an editable field on, that may be technically impossible. There has to be some type of submit button since it will always take a user action for the data to be submitted to the database.

  3. Maybe you could just add a “always keep open” checkbox next to the submit that keeps the functionality and all but simply just always keeps the edit field open. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about HTML and linebreaks, since the textfield is visible all the time anyway.
    Of course now users could be prone to making edits without submitting them but this would be a caveat of the “always keep open” option. Of course there could be a red text that notifies you if you’ve changed anything but that’s propably too much work?

  7. Anthony, this is tied to the Capability “Edit dashboard”, which is enabled by default for the Roles editor and admin. See Roles and Capabilities and the Role Manager plugin. Suppose you disable this capability for Editors, then you as an Admin will be able to edit the note, but lower user levels will only be able to view it.

  10. Nice plugin.

    One extra thing that might be nice is to allow the the title of the widget to be changed from the default “Post It”. Then if you were posting some guidelines for posting on WordPress you could call the box “Posting Guidelines” or whatever.

  11. Anytime I put a link in the post-it, it redirects to my current domain instead of taking me to the address I want to go to. Any idea why?

  13. Okay, I just uploaded version 1.1 which fixes the line break issue (Martin’s suggestion) and makes the title editable (thanks Ben for the suggestion).

    Warning: upgrading will cause your custom text to be lost. I see no easy solution for that; a workaround is to copy your text before upgrading and paste it into the new version. Sorry about that.

  16. excellent solution to post info for multi authors. Especially as it is visible on dashboards across all user levels. Saved my bacon after a day of fruitless cloning and copying dashboard stuff

    cheers

  18. It works perfectly fine with 3.0+. I have been slow in updating it because I have to find time for adding some code to preserve the note’s content during upgrade. That went wrong last time and I don’t want to inflict that again on users.

  19. Hi Mark,

    Is there a way to post multiple post its on the dashboard? I was just thinking of copying the entire contents of your plugin and naming it something else.. thinking that WordPress might see it as a different plugin.

    Just thought I’d ask you first :)

    Thanks,
    Bhavya

  21. Hi Mark,

    I have to jump in here to and thank you for the plugin too. It is very useful in communicating things to my authors.

    I’m also interested in the multiple instances idea. And I was thinking along the same lines as Bhavya, renaming it and changing any references to the name in the code.

    But what I would really like to do it put it in a different place – right below the main text area on the ‘add new post’ page – so I can include some instructions on how and what I want them to write, right there :)

    Do you know an easy way to do that? I’ll be experimenting with the idea.

    Thanks again, Chris

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