Today I’m happy to announce rah_wrach. That’s right, that section prompt plugin for Textpattern 4.5 is finally here and ready for your downloading.

What rah_wrach does is that it adds an extra step to your article publishing process. The plugin presents a prompt and makes all site authors to choose the article’s designated section before going to the actual editor present on the Write panel. The idea of this extra step is to hopefully increase the change of articles actually going to correct sections.

Prompt got a facelift

Before rah_wrach there was a plugin with the same goal, rah_write_each_section. Rah_wrach itself is a direct update to rah_write_each_section. Things have changed from that old fella, more than just by functionality, but by looks too.

I have to say that rah_wrach fits well with the whole new Textpattern 4.5 looks. This is made possible by the new grid layout introduced in Textpattern 4.5. This grid layout is one of the many things Textpattern Team’s newest addition, Phil Wareham, brought with him.

In addition to looking better, the grid layout allows showing some useful extra information about each section without cluttering the view. Directly from the prompt you can see the number of articles in each section. By clicking an article count label, you will be shown all articles in that section.

The prompt also displays badges indicating whether articles will be going to RSS feeds or to the site’s front page. Visible is also the section page’s location on the site which can come particularly handy if you are using a custom URL function or if the section’s title and name are very different.

Preferences

One of the things rah_write_each_section didn’t do that well was it that it didn’t offer a thing on the preferences department. Rah_wrach aids the situation by adding few very simple settings.

From Preferences panel you can set which sections are visible in the prompt and optionally hide the section field present on the Write panel.

Get it now

You can download and find out more about rah_wrach here, or follow future developments on GitHub.

Have tips, tricks or feedback? Let @gocom on Twitter to know.