Unsortable Meta Box Archives

In the last few days I updated 2 of my plugins – Completely Delete and Unsortable Meta Box, there is nothing huge, I just removed the WordPress Settings API wrapper from them, and created the settings pages based on Tom McFarlin’s WordPress Settings Sandbox.

When developed these 2 plugins, to use or not to use any WordPress Settings API wrapper, that is the question kinda bothered me. I was hoping Tom could integrate the settings page to his Plugin Boilerplate, but got no luck. The barrier kept me from using the Settings API was, even though the Codex looked simple – with only 10 functions I could create a settings page, I had no idea when to use which function.

To speed up my development process, I decided to use one of the Settings API wrappers I found at Github. It’s a very good one, with clear documentation that I can see how to code and what I’ll get. So I integrated it into Completely Delete and later I also used it in Unsortable Meta Box.

Today we publish our second WordPress plugin – Unsortable Meta Box. It makes the meta boxes cannot be dragged or sorted, and could reset them to the default order.

The idea came from a client project, like our previous plugin – Completely Delete. Have you ever did the technical support online or on the phone with your clients? One challenge we face all the time, is to keep clients and us on the same page, since we couldn’t look at the same screen. Few weeks ago a client called and complaint the post screen looked weird, not like the one we showed on the demo. But I couldn’t tell what’s the weird part when I logged in, I saw the same WordPress post screen as all the time – the default fields with meta boxes I added using Meta Box plugin.

Remove Settings API Wrapper from My Plugins

Disable dragging of meta boxes and reset positions