There’s been a lot of talk about the upcoming release of WordPress 3.5, in specific the new Media Manager. To say it’s sexy is an understatement. The core team (@Koop in particular) put a lot of work into it, and it shows.
One thing I noticed while beta testing my plugins was the new UI around the media buttons. One of my plugins, Schema Creator, uses a button in the same row to load the form. Well, the existing icon setup matched 3.4, but 3.5 released a new look along with text within the button container. So now mine looked woefully out of place.
And we can’t have that, can we? Here’s an example of the difference:
Now, the entire media loader is different. No more Thickbox at all. So there’s certainly a lot to be done. But for the launch, I wanted to make sure my UI was consistent. So while I wanted those who update to 3.5 to have a solid UI, I didn’t want to startle those who aren’t on 3.4. And I also wanted to update it before the release, since we’re all busy and I didn’t want to wait until after it went live.
So I wrote a small function to do a version check and load the button markup based on which version they had.
WP Core Version Check
You can do just about anything you’d like with that. All I did was change the button markup and add a span for an image. But you could do everything from load different JS files (which I plan on doing soon) or add / remove UI elements. The world, as they say, is your oyster.
shayne
Nice! Goes to show that tutorials don’t have to be a book – and what you’re doing with these shorter tutorials is great!
My opinion – it’s better this way as it will give people just enough to go and do what they need and learn some in the process. What’s the fun in just copying/pasting someone else’s work?
Good job buddy.
Norcross
Thanks! I’m hoping that I can grab these small things as I’m doing my daily work and share them with others. Shorter is certainly something I have a better shot at accomplishing, that’s for sure.
The Frosty
Why not use global
$wp_versionand PHP’s version_compare?Norcross
no reason why not, both would work. and if I were doing numerous checks, then I’d probably add a function inside the class to do the check and call it when needed.
but for this instance, I needed a quick compare.
Lee Willis
I’d echo the previous comments about version_compare – it’s a lot more reliable – especially when people start using beta/svn releases.
Scott Hack
Quick question — Once you update this plugin again, will you leave this in place? Or just raise the required minimum for the plugin and only support 3.5+? I’m just wondering how long is appropriate to keep the band-aid on. It totally makes sense with 3.5 coming out and wanting to get your update done before hand, but how long afterwards should the plugin be backwards compatible?
Norcross
since it’s a small UI change, there’s not a big rush to remove the old version. while I’d love it if everyone kept WP updated all the time, it’s probably not the case. If it were a larger switch, I may feel different.