The widget (version 1.2.2) adds calendar functionality to a WordPress website. This includes an automatically-generated Calendar page, like it or not. (If the widget is still installed on this site, you’ll see the Calendar page it generates in the menu.)
Like Ajax Events Calendar, All-in-One has severly limited options for recurring events. But the administrative interface and the widget’s output may be polished and useful enough for me to tolerate the shortcoming.
This widget (version 1.0, by Eran Miller) comes with no documentation for the non-programmer. So, having installed it, I’ll try typing its “shortcode” (the word “calendar” between square brackets) as instructed, and see what happens.
Update: Aha, it caused a calendar to appear below (that is, at the point in the post where I inserted the code). It was a typical month-view grid (with buttons for navigating to other months) and populated with an event that was entered by default during installation (that is, it displayed “Ajax Event Calendar [v1.0] successfully installed!” under today’s date). Some elements of the plugin’s appearance have settings I could change.
Also, by creating a page (instead of a post) and typing the shortcode there, I could make this calendar appear as a fixed option in the site’s navigation menu. (If I’d left it in this post, it would’ve been pushed off the page eventually by newer posts.)
I’ve uninstalled the widget, because I found the appearance unappealing. Also, the options for recurring events are unsatisfactory; for instance, it requres one to specify the exact number of days between occurrences, which of course won’t work for typical monthly events.
The Toolbox theme is displaying a pipe character (“|”) above the comment box (on the home page) when it’s not needed. If I’m not mistaken, this pipe’s purpose is to divide the “leave a comment” option from the “edit this post” option. The problem is that the editing option is absent when one is logged out, yet the pipe remains.
I’ll comment on this post, then disallow comments on the post and, while remaining logged in, see whether the first option disappears while the pipe and the second option remain.
Update, 28 Dec 2011: There are two additional items (the post’s tags, if any, and its category) that show up below posts when using the Toolbox theme and viewing certain pages. The idea is that each of the four items appears only when needed or appropriate. (For instance, if commenting is closed for a post or it has no tags, those items will not appear.) The problem is still as stated above: an item brings a trailing pipe to separate it from items to follow — whether anything actually follows or not.
I learned all this while playing with the code and solving the problem as initally stated. Since the four items may be present or absent in various combinations, they required a more elaborate fix, but the principle was the same: Test whether two items are present to determine whether a pipe to separate them is needed.
My recollection of first posts on blogs is that they seem hopeful and doomed. The writers signal that more is on the way, yet we read these first posts because the more that would have buried them from view never arrived.
English Composition in high school was the first class I failed. This happened not because my writing was poor, but because my hopes for my writing were so high that I never allowed myself to start.
Beyond those remarks, words fail me. But the deadline is here. I post.