Soma Design

It looks like I may carve out a niche for cranky Word­Press plu­g­ins. This could either be seen as a per­son­al­i­ty flaw or as a per­fect fit with­in open-source cul­ture. In either case, Word­Press makes it easy for irri­ta­ble peo­ple to release plu­g­ins to change what they don’t like about it. I’ve done so twice recently.

Kill Adminbar Search

WP 3.1 intro­duced the admin bar, which is gen­er­al­ly quite use­ful. How­ev­er, because Word­Press’s search is gen­er­al­ly not use­ful, hav­ing the search field take up so much real estate is some­what frus­trat­ing. So, I made a plu­g­in to remove it. You can down­load Kill Admin­bar Search from the plu­g­ins repo.

Use Helvetica Dangit

WP 3.2 (cur­rent­ly in beta 2) has revamped the admin styles. It looks good, but we’ve made the griev­ous error of plac­ing Ari­al before Hel­veti­ca in the font stack, which I protest­ed. What we should do instead is sim­ply declare font-family: sans-serif; and be done with it: this would ren­der Hel­veti­ca Neue on Macs, Ari­al on Win­dows, and what­ev­er Hel­veti­ca-like default sys­tem sans-serif is set on any giv­en Lin­ux dis­tro. But, since my plu­g­in is option­al, I’ve declared every Hel­veti­ca vari­ant under the sun, because nobody should have to look at Ari­al if they don’t have to. Down­load Use Hel­veti­ca Dan­git from the plu­g­ins repo.