723567 - [One Mozilla - Tabzilla] Wordpress Alternative

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Websites :: Tabzilla, defect, P1)

Description

[mcbmoz]

Opening this bug for Craig to work with Steven on a WordPress-friendly PHP component to use in blogs. Something portable that can easily be  added to a theme (not necessarily a plugin, but maybe?).

Comment 1

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

Craig has sent me some great feedback on Tabzilla with some excellent ideas for improvements we're going to work on.

In the mean time, though, I think what we've got will work fine without any special customization for wordpress. The documentation for implementation: https://github.com/mozilla/tabzilla/blob/master/README.md

Comment 2

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

I think the problem here is that you need to manually edit every single blog template to add this. Wrapping it into a lightweight plugin wrapper might solve this very easily. For fun, I might look into this, unless Craig is faster than I am.

Comment 3

[Craig Cook (:craigcook)]

(In reply to Fred Wenzel [:wenzel] from comment #2)
> For fun, I might look into this, unless Craig is
> faster than I am.

By all means, have fun ;) I may not have much time to dedicate to this right away so you'll probably be able to beat me to it.

Adding tabzilla into a theme by hand is easy-peasy, and it'll be built into the One Mozilla theme by default already. Packaging it as a plugin would make it possible to add tabzilla to any off-the-rack theme as well, and WordPress should provide all the template hooks we need. Of course, it'll play nicer with some themes than with others, depending on the way their headers are designed. Plenty of themes will just be tabzilla-incompatible.

Comment 4

[Craig Cook (:craigcook)]

Fred spent a little time on this today and it doesn't seem as simple as I had hoped it would be. I thought WordPress provided a template hook to insert content into the top of the page, but that turns out not to be the case (we can insert content and at the bottom of the page, but not at the top). So our options are much more limited. 

We could add the tab at end of the page and position it at the top with CSS, but it would lack the proper positioning context for correct placement. It would end up either at the far right of the window, or some fixed distance from the right edge that usually wouldn't line up with the rest of the layout.

Or we could add a bit of JavaScript that would generate the tab at the top of the page, and it would still lack the positioning context so we're in the same boat. But we could then include some option in the plugin for a blog admin to identify the parent element so the script would know where to insert the tab in the document. But that's fiddly and not very user-friendly. You'd still have to be familiar with the theme code and at that point you might as well just add it by hand anyway.

We could make a template tag that would be easy to insert into a theme, but pasting <?php tabzilla(); ?> into the header of a theme is no easier than pasting <a id="tabzilla">Mozilla</a> so we wouldn't really gain anything by bundling it as a plugin in the first place. Every theme implementing tabzilla would still need to be modified by hand.

So it was worth investigating the options but Fred and I decided it's not really practical to do a tabzilla plugin.

Instead, what we should do is try to identify the most active blogs in our network that are using a third-party, off-the-rack theme, as well as the most popular third-party themes we currently have installed, and just add tabzilla to them by hand (it's really easy to add, just a few lines of code). Some themes will need some minor adjustments to make space for the tab so this would let us tweak them on a case by case basis.

This could also be a good chance to do a bit of a blog audit and weed out any unused themes we should uninstall, or long-abandoned blogs we might be able to archive or delete.

Unless there are any strong objections or options we haven't considered, I'm calling this a "wontfix."

Comment 5

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

I concur: I had to do some ugly JS hackery to add the link to the theme *at all*, but even so it's not placed appropriately unless one edits the theme and puts it somewhere by hand.

By the time you do that and have to edit the theme partially to even make the plugin work, I agreed with Craig that you might as well just copy and paste the three things that are needed to use tabzilla in the first place.

I did, however, commit my code. Craig (and anyone else), feel free to look at what I did there :)

https://github.com/fwenzel/tabzilla/tree/wp-plugin/wp-tabzilla

Comment 6

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

Sorry for the bugspam -- the Target Milestore was set unexpectedly.