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I have just learnt of a great video tutorial covering the installation and use of Menubar, the WordPress plugin that allows you to add configurable menus to your site.

You can find this 13 minute tutorial on Codes Scripts. The author is Patrick Hamy, and he has made a very good job of explaining carefully and clearly all the steps needed to install Menubar and start using it. The tutorial is in French, but I think it’s going to be useful to non French speakers too.

Thank you Patrick!

This new Menubar version supports a new menu item type, named PHP. With this type you can dynamically generate a menu item using PHP code, so its applications are limited only by your imagination.

You can enter in the URL field any PHP code which returns your dynamically generated URL; you may also return an empty value, and in this case Menubar will generate no menu item at all.

A sample of the PHP code you can insert in the URL field is as follows:

// content of the URL field

$someurl = some expression;
$otherurl = other expression;

if (some-condition)
return $someurl;
else if (other-condition)
return $otherurl;
else
return '';


This PHP snippet generates:

a) a menu item pointing to $someurl if (some-condition) is met;
b) a menu item pointing to $otherurl if (other-condition) is met;
c) no menu item otherwise.

This is only a sample, you can use any PHP code and return the URL you need or no URL at all. Happy menus with Menubar!

We had a MySQL server problem yesterday, now it’s been repaired and the database restored. Unfortunately a few very recent comments were lost, so please resubmit your comment if it disappeared. Sorry for the inconvenience!

[Updated April 20, 2012]

When I had a chance to look into BuddyPress, the ‘social networking in a box’ for WordPress, I noticed that a plugin to search, or filter, the members directory was still missing, and that prompted me to release BP Profile Search.

In this page you can find the updated documentation for BP Profile Search 3.0.

Features

BP Profile Search adds a configurable search form to your BuddyPress site, so visitors can find site members searching their extended profiles.

You can insert the search form in a post or page, or in a sidebar or widget area, or anywhere in your theme, e.g. in your Members Directory template file.

In all three cases when visitors click ‘Search’, they are served your Members Directory page showing their search results.

Configuration

After the standard manual or automatic plugin installation procedure, you can access the plugin admin page BuddyPress -> Profile Search, where you have the following options:

* Specify the HTML text for the form header and welcome message.

* Enable the toggle form feature.

* Select the profile fields to include in the search form (currently the datebox profile fields are not supported).

* If your extended profiles include a birth date field, enable the age range search, so your visitors can specify the minimum and maximum age for their search.

* Select the members list to filter, if your Members Directory page contains more than one.

* Select the search mode for text fields, between:
– partial match, where a search for John matches John, Johnson, or Long John Silver;
– exact match, where a search for John matches John only.

In both search modes the wildcard characters % (percent sign), matching zero or more characters, and _ (underscore), matching exactly one character, are available to your visitors to better specify their search.

Displaying the search form

There are three different ways to integrate your BP Profile Search form in your BuddyPress site. You can insert the form:

a) in a post or page, using the shortcode [bp_profile_search_form]

b) in a sidebar or widget area, using the BP Profile Search widget

c) in your template files, e.g. in your Members Directory page, using the code
<?php do_action (‘bp_profile_search_form’); ?>

Shortcodes and widgets are standard WordPress features, so I won’t explain their usage here. Adding the search form in your template files is also very simple, as shown in the following example.

If you wish to add the search form to your Members Directory page, and you are using the BuddyPress default theme, open index.php in the buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/members folder, locate the line:

</div><!-- #members-dir-search -->

and, right after that, insert the BP Profile Search form:

<?php do_action ('bp_profile_search_form'); ?>

If you are not using the BuddyPress default theme, the procedure might be different.

Troubleshooting

If your searches always return the full members list, try changing the Filtered Members List value in BuddyPress -> Profile Search, Advanced Options tab.

Conclusions

I hope you find this plugin useful and help me improve it, with your suggestions, bug reports, and patches. BP Profile Search is available for download in the WordPress Plugin Directory and in the BuddyPress Plugin Directory.

WordPress was born in 2003 as the official successor of the b2/cafelog weblog platform.

From the original post of Michel Valdrighi, author of b2: “Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little are leading the new WordPress branch of b2, that is going to become the new official branch once they get a release out. If you want to help with WordPress, don’t hesitate to contact either of them!”

Significant steps in WordPress history are:

- WordPress 0.70, released on May 27, 2003. This was the first non-beta version of WordPress, and represented a great deal of work between Mike and Matt in improving the b2 codebase;

- WordPress 1.2, released on May 22, 2004, right after Movable Type had some issues with their licensing and many users were looking for a new system to move to. Version 1.2 was used by an order of magnitude more people than former WP releases;

- WordPress 1.5, released on February 14, 2005, introduced static pages and a new theme system, including the successful Kubrick theme by Michael Heilemann;

- and WordPress 3.0, released on June 17, 2010, added the Custom Menu management feature, and merged WordPress and WordPress MU, creating the new multi-site functionality.

WordPress is a PHP – MySQL application, and is released under the GNU GPL (General Public License).