Offer Closed
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I had a customer request for this plugin and I thought it was such a cracking idea that I just had to go get it done.And like all the better ideas, what started out as a fairly small plugin has turned into something much bigger and fuller featured and I hope you’ll have your socks blown off by this plugin just as hard as mine were. 😉
Here’s a short video overview or you can just carry on reading.
Update: The video is now out of date as we changed the interface but it’s still very representative of the plugin.
The concept is a simple one and as far as I can see it’s been poorly done up to now.
The original request was for a plugin which added a set of 3 slim tabs to the right and left of the page which stayed in place when the page was scrolled up and down, but when hovered over would slide out onto the page.
The slide out would contain the content (HTML), and it could be a video, a sign up box, or anything you like, menus, images, whatever.
That was the ORIGINAL request.
We took it all a bit farther than that. 😉
I decided that rather than just supply a content box in the admin panel where you could paste some HTML… that we’d hook it all into the WP widgetised areas system instead.
What does that mean?
It means that when you create a new tab in the admin panel (unlimited – create as many as you think will fit), it also creates a new widgetised area (sidebar) for the slide-out.
Wow… 😉
Any widgets you drop into the newly created widgetised area get inserted into the slide-out just as if it were a sidebar.
This means you can insert HTML via a text widget, a menu, a sign up box, in fact ANYTHING you have a widget for, you can now insert into the slide-out.
I hope you can see how powerful that makes this plugin.
In theory at least, you could use a theme without a sidebar on the home page and instead use slide-out tabs.
When creating this I also realised that you might not want to put all the tabs on every page, and that you might even want to put different tabs on different pages, or even none at all.
Sorted.
We used the same method that Ads Manager uses of the built in developer system in WordPress called Conditional Tags, and we bent it to our will.
If you’ve never used the Conditional Tags system, then you’re in for a real treat as it gives you total flexibility in setting up rules for things to trigger based on whereabouts on a blog you are.
Built into the Conditional Tags system are rules that allow you to choose which post(s) or page(s) you want the tabs to appear on. Or if it’s the home page. Or the categories page, or the tags page. There are a massive amount of rules and you can also use negatives of those rules too.
So you can say “not on the home page” or “not on these posts” and so on.
This means you can stack tabs in the same position on a page, but show different tabs depending on where the visitor is reading your blog.
To put that another way, you might have 2 tabs on the left that are 100 pixels down and the same height. Normally one would overlay and obscure the other, but you can set the rules to say that one tab appears on the home page and the other tab appears on every post, but not on any pages.
Is that totally COOL or what? 🙄
I’m releasing the Slide Out Tabs plugin over this weekend starting at just $10, and I’ll drop you a line a few hours before I’m ready. It comes with personal use rights and also developer rights so you can install on client blogs. If enough people ask I’ll also consider releasing a blog flipper licence for an additional fee.
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In the meantime, I’d also like to remind you that the sale for Instant Graphics Injection ends on Monday but you can currently get this massive pack for just $10 here.
-Frank Haywood
