Ticket #6315 (new defect)

Opened 4 months ago

Last modified 2 weeks ago

ID's missing from all admin screens

Reported by: Otto42 Assigned to: anonymous
Priority: high Milestone: 2.6
Component: Template Version: 2.5
Severity: major Keywords:
Cc: westi

Description

In trunk, the Manage Posts/Pages/Categories/etc screens have all had their ID numbers removed. This information is necessary for users to know when editing their themes. How can somebody create a "category-X.php" file if they don't know what "X" is supposed to be? Same for post and page ID's, when used with various functions that require ID numbers.

These all need to be added back, large sections of theme editing are now much more difficult to do, sometimes requiring manually looking at the database because of this missing information. Users on the support forums are already starting to complain, and it's not even released yet (first time I've ever seen that).

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/162533

Change History

03/20/08 19:22:44 changed by Otto42

  • severity changed from blocker to major.

03/20/08 21:48:13 changed by ryan

ID could be worked into the title attribute for the edit links.

03/22/08 20:57:03 changed by MichaelH

Another one: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/162877

03/25/08 17:36:39 changed by westi

  • cc set to westi.

03/25/08 17:57:12 changed by ryan

You can get the ID from the edit link URLs. We can do something friendlier, but this little used information need not be prominent.

03/25/08 18:06:38 changed by westi

Cross posted from wp-testers ;-)

thinking about this some more maybe the correct approach is to encourage theme authors to not use template tag calls based on ID's but to write them using slugs instead.

We may need to improve all of the usual template tag calls that people call with ID's to accept slugs but this would lead to more portable themes.

I've lost count of the number of themes that have an about page link that by default links to # as the theme author didn't know which ID to use for the about page. If they could have put in a link to the page with the slug about then the theme would be just that little bit better!

(in reply to: ↑ description ) 03/28/08 15:03:08 changed by jsherk

Would like to see the Post ID displayed as it was (or similar) to wp2.3, where it shows up on the Manage screen. Is use these all the time!

04/08/08 01:11:47 changed by jhodgdon

+1 on getting the ID numbers back -- hovering to find them on the Manage screens is a pain.

Anyway, apparently someone has written a plugin to do this:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/reveal-ids-for-wp-admin-25/

The plugin even has options to turn on/off display of the IDs, so while you are in plugin/theme dev mode you can turn it on, then turn it back off again for clean screens.

How about incorporating in core?

04/08/08 01:22:17 changed by ryan

I think this is best as a plugin. Most people don't give a hoot about IDs. The people who need IDs are savvy enough to find them or install a plugin to expose them. Giving non-presentational data such as IDs prominent display in their own column is a waste of precious real estate.

04/08/08 16:20:27 changed by jhodgdon

If you don't want to put this into Core, then in my opinion, someone needs to do a lot of Codex editing. There are a ton of functions and procedures that involve knowing the ID numbers for posts, pages, etc. Particularly for theme development. We'll need to link to this plugin, and hope the author continues to maintain it.

I'd prefer to be able to say something like "Go to the Advanced tab of the Settings pages, and check the Show IDs checkbox", rather than relying on this particular plugin to be available. I understand that most people don't need to see IDs, but I think there are enough reasons for needing IDs that it merits having the ability to turn them on in core, without searching for this plugin and relying on its continued existence. Hovering over links to try to find the ID number in the URL is REALLY ANNOYING.

04/09/08 14:49:02 changed by Otto42

While the plugin is extremely handy, this really, really needs to be a built in. If not displayed all the time (seriously? one thin extra column is cluttered to you), then it needs to be an option. It can be off by default, but it must be there.

Too much of the core code and theme functions require IDs of things as input. Users edit themes. This is a fact. And if they're going to be doing that, then they very often need this sort of information to do it. Pointing them to a plugin for functionality that they *require* is silly.

I have no problem with information hiding and simplifying the interface, but simplifying it to the point where they need third party software to make it give them what they need for normal usage is just plain stupid.

04/27/08 16:18:19 changed by gambit37

I concur with Otto42 and jhodgdon. The Codex discusses many of WPs hooks and parameters and often shows how to exclude things from actions using IDs (for example wp_list_pages). Why would you suddenly make the this functionality useless by obfuscating the essential piece of information required to make it work?

06/21/08 00:42:35 changed by thee17

What is we added a per user setting to enable this and apend them to the Title link?