Today P2 Version 1.4.0 has been released – hurra! Thanks for everyone’s hard work on this amazing theme.
P2 now boasts a couple of extra options and plenty of changes under the hood, but like many other great features those are not immediately obvious. Let me show you how the new changes work and how they can make your P2 experience even better.
To-Do List Feature
The latest and greatest addition in Version 1.4.0 includes the To-Do List feature. With it you can write lists of things you and your team need to do, and have a record of the things that you’ve already done. Here’s what it looks like in action:
You can create those by putting each of your to-do items on a separate line and starting it with either a small letter x (for ticked) or a small letter o (for unticked) like this:
To change the state of an item, users can simply tick or untick the boxes, and upon page refresh the system will add a strike-thru with a user mention behind the list item (or remove it respectively).
Note this does not work for all user roles though – here’s a list I’ve compiled (thanks to a question from Tevya – otherwise I would have neve found out about this cool feature):
- Subscribers and Contributors – can write to-do lists, but can neither tick their own nor other people’s boxes.
- Authors – can write to-do lists, can tick their own, but not other people’s boxes.
- Editors and Admins – can write to-do lists and can tick other people’s boxes.
Without the page refresh the tick is there and the system will save it but the mention and strike-thru won’t be visible. I find this feature incredibly useful.
Custom Menu Support
Another great new 1.4.0 feature is the support for custom menus, including drop-down child item support. It’ll be displayed between your header and your content:
You can create your own menu under Appearance – Menus in the WordPress backend.
Under the Hood: introducing Custom Post Formats
Prior to this version of P2, the posts you created from the front page were automatically filed into one of four categories: status, post, quote and link. I’ve explained how to change those to your own requirements in this article.
Here’s a familiar site for P2 posts in versions 1.3.3 and prior:
Version 1.4.0 utilises WordPress Custom Post Formats instead. This means that no matter what you select at the top, everything is posted in your default category (defined under Settings – Writing). Now each post is saved as a custom post format – apart from Blog Posts which are just standard posts:
This means of course that if you’ve amended the theme with your own labels and categories, this tweak will no longer work. As soon as we figure out how to override this in Version 1.4.0 I’ll let you know.
Link Styling
Remember the link option that never really did anything? The one that used to confuse everybody? Looks like the team have given it some styling – now it looks just like a Quote with a blue highlight:
New Santa Background Texture
Christmas may be a while off yet, but time melts away like he snow in the sun. When the time is right and you want to add a bit of Xmas Pazazz to your P2 site, head over to Appearance – Settings and select Santa from the list of included backgrounds.
Writing Lists with Bullet Points
On the note of To Do lists, the “standard lists” feature has been around for a while, so I thought for completion I’ll mention it here.
You can create what’s known as “unordered lists” in HTML. Those are the ones starting with bullet points like in this example:
You can write those in a similar way as the to-do lists, just by placing a minus sign in front of each line:
Even though writing those is simple, editing those is a little bit more complex. The way P2 creates the list is by replacing each “-” and wrapping the entire line in HTML code needed to display those bullet points. If you hit the EDIT button here’s what your list looks like:
A brief explanation: an unordered list starts with <ul> and ends with </ul>. In between, each item starts with <li> and ends with </li>. So if you want to add an item retrospectively to your list, wrap your line in those <li></li> tags and put them above the closing </ul> tag.
Alternatively, you can always visit your WordPress back end and edit the post in the visual editor.
@Valuser, I believe P2 switched to using post formats for this a few versions ago. It’s not using categories but rather post formats. So there should be a way to add additional formats, it’ll just be a little different than adding categories. See here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Formats
@Jay thanks so much for your great info! Can other users check off things on a checklist? And do they remain checked for all? Or does the original poster, have to go in and change the o to an x? Thanks.
Hi Tevya,
Actually Custom Post Types is a brand new addition to this version of P2, the previous version 1.3.3 was still using categories. I’ll amend this post accordingly.
As for to-do lists, they can be changed by any user with access to global post editing capabilities. Only Admins and Editors can edit other people’s posts (and hence to to-do lists) but Contributors, Authors and Subscribers cannot. They can however edit their own posts.
Update:
I’ve just added Custom Post Types, Link Styling and the new Santa Texture to the article.
Hi Jay – thanks for great article and here’s hoping your thread will inspire new workout for the categories as option vs post types … ugh – i love upgrades but hate when things dramatically change and force entire new logic … with 1.3.3 i had beautiful category drop down that worked like a charm (per your previous code to modify core p2 inc/ajax.php and js/p2.js files along with tweaks to child theme) … but after spending two days now struggling to get that code to play nice with new 1.4, i’ve realized (per comments here) that my efforts are hopelessly in vain given the new use of post_formats vs previous method … oh well, nobody likes complainers so i’ll role back and stay with 1.3.3 … but will keep my fingers crossed that a new work out might be forthcoming … viva the power of open source and community that shares … again, thanks for thread and info … cordially, chuck scott
Great write-up — this is the exact info I was looking for. Thanks!
FYI — you refer to Custom Post *Types* — are these actually Types, or are they Custom Post *Formats*? It would make more sense for them to be the latter.