The Lair

So I’ve been playing around a bit with Greasemonkey. And where better to start than by tweaking some things I don’t like about various webby interfaces ? Well, a couple of days ago, I started seriously reading Dive into Greasemonkey. What follows are a couple of small tweaks to pages that I seem to visit frequently.

So, following in the footsteps of other GM-Wordpress hackery, I’ve written my own user script for Wordpress. It’s called (somewhat grandly), Greasepress.

What does it do ? Well, in a sentence, it unclutters the “write post” interface of Wordpress. It works on the current (1.5.1.2) version. I think it should also work on any older 1.5 version, but I can’t be sure of this. I have only tested this on Firefox 1.0.4 with Greasemonkey 0.3.3 (I’m very interested in supporting Turnabout at some point, but it’s not a priority just yet).

Greasepress works by allowing the user to hide or display (basically, toggle visibility) of certain user interface elements on the “Write Post” interface. Why did I want this ? Well, I wanted a larger textarea to write posts. Certain things on the current Write post page only need to be set once (if at all) and then the user can safely forget about them. These things include the category checkboxes, the trackback URL input box and (a very individual taste), also the line of quick tag buttons. I’ve not needed to use trackback yet, I don’t use quicktags and I set categories when I start writing a post. So why not reclaim the space for a larger textarea ? That’s how the idea for Greasepress was born.

So Greasepress rewrites the write post page to include a bar of checkboxes. You can see the initial write post screen below (click for a larger image)

Click on the checkboxes, hide the UI elements that you wish and then it may look something like this:

Of course, this would be rather irritating to do each time, so there is also a button to save your current options (which UI elements remain hidden and which are visible). Each time I start a new post, the options are “remembered” on this machine (and this browser) so I don’t need to manually hide things all over again. By default, everything is visible the first time the Greasemonkey script is run.

No one ever saw 0.1 because I immediately discovered that the draft version of a post produces a ugly page. So, I made a small fix and tweaked things to work on draft pages as well.

Tell me how it works for you. Install it from here. (current version as of 10th June, 2005 is 0.11)

Update: Two other projects that do (IMHO) nicer things with the WP admin interface; the Tiger theme and it’s greasemonkey port. Very cool stuff.