Lara Swanson

There are many big usability no-nos that I see daily on photographers’ blogs, including an inaccessible portfolio, difficult navigation, and long, unreadable URLs. Improving these issues will make your blog significantly more user friendly, and help keep new visitors on your site!

Check out the post I contributed to Elizabeth Halford’s blog for details on how to avoid these mistakes: Strategies for Photography Blogging Success

(There are a lot more blog posts coming up that I’ve contributed to other blogs… next week should be very busy!)

As I was designing a multi-author blog, I realized that it would be helpful for the authors to each be able to quickly see which posts were theirs, and highlight which of their posts were still in draft form (so they could go through and finish them).

To do this, I added a new class to each row in the post list, and styled it within the admin CSS file.

First, open up /wp-admin/includes/template.php. Find the section that creates the rows of posts, and edit it to include the below code:

$post_owner = ( get_current_user_id() == $post->post_author ? 'self' : 'other' );
$its_author = ( $post->post_author ); // Add this line to use below
$edit_link = get_edit_post_link( $post->ID );

We defined this new variable so we don’t disrupt the “self” value that $post_owner creates, in case we need to use that as well. Next, you’ll need to call the $its_author variable as part of the table row’s classes.

<tr id='post-<?php echo $post->ID; ?>' class='<?php echo trim( $rowclass . ' author-' . $post_owner . ' author-' . $its_author . ' status-' . $post->post_status ); ?> iedit' valign="top">

Then, find the stylesheet for your admin area. Mine was in /wp-admin/css-colors-fresh.css. Add the styling for your new classes, defining a new class for each of the authors:

.author-2 { background-color: #E5EDEF; }
.author-3 { background-color: #EFE6DF; }
.author-2.status-draft th { background-color: #2E96AA; }
.author-3.status-draft th { background-color: #DA7220; }
.author-4.status-draft th { background-color: #888; }

These will add colors to the rows and the table headers in your admin area, based on author!