The Page.ly MultiEdit Plugin

We have been using WordPress a long time, and we always felt like it needed just a little more oomph to the editor.  This plugin is a update of an older plugin we wrote.

0.9.7 has been tested with 3.0

The MultiEdit plugin creates tinyMCE editable regions or “blocks” inside a page template. This is great for creating a template specific content block outside of the normal the_content() output. Perfect for creating two column single page layouts etc. Note: Only Works with Visual Editor

Instructions

1. Install the MultiEdit plugin to your blog/website

2. Activate the Plugin

3. Create a custom page template and declare MultiEdit regions as a comma separated list under Template Name. May be able to just add the MultiEdit line to page.php as well.. not tested. NOTE: Do not add spaces the list or region names.

Good: MultiEdit: Right,Bottom,Left
Bad: MultiEdit: Left,Right Column,Bottom (space between region name)
Bad: MultiEdit: Left, Right, Bottom (space after comma)

4. Then within your template, determine where this content will show by calling the function. multieditDisplay(‘Region’)

5. Create or Edit a Page and select the custom template. in this case CustomPage

6. Refresh the page, and you will see Tabs above the TinyMCE editor that correlate with the name of your defined regions.

7. Click a tab, add content, save the page.  When you view the page now you will see your MultiEdit content renders on the page. style with CSS as needed.

All done.

Note: The data is saved in custom_fields associated with this post/page. If you deactivate the plugin, the content is not lost as it is saved as a meta item. The plugin creates the custom fields for you based on what you declare in the template file.

Why use this plugin?

Ever need to add content to a page out side of the normal the_content() area.  Previously you either added it directly to the page template, or you created a widget region specifically for it. Both methods are impractical. Your client cannot edit hardcoded content (easily) and why create tons of widget areas if you are only going to use them on 1 or 2 pages.  This plugin allows you to create content blocks per template.  So if you define 2 MultieEdit regions, every page that uses this template will get 2 additional editable regions that you can use on every page using this template, and the content is unique to that page.

This may be helpful

Plugin is released under GPL. Feel free to tweak it or incorporate it into your theme framework as needed. Please retain our copyright notice (in the plugin file) and give credit where credit is due if you modify/incorporate it.

Who Wrote this Plugin?

Joshua Strebel the founder of Page.ly did. Okay, But what’s page.ly? : Complete WordPress Hosting with a sexy 2 minute setup.

Enjoy.

Updated WordPress 3.0

A user was kind enough to let us know about how the plugin works in 3.0

if (in_array(basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']),array(‘page.php’)) && $_GET['action'] == ‘edit’ ) {
add_action(‘init’,'multiedit’);
}

For some reason, the wp-admin url when editing a page does not include page.php anymore but instead post.php, maybe due to the fact that a page is now a custom post type.

By changing the above to:

if (in_array(basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']),array(‘post.php’)) && $_GET['action'] == ‘edit’ ) {
add_action(‘init’,'multiedit’);
}

the tabs are now showing up!