sidebar plugins - heading text

[gwilsonmail]

Is there a reason why, on most, sidebar plugins do not allow configuration of the text that makes up the title?

Would it be possible to make this configurable system-wide? with an option to have no title displayed.

[wesley]

The reason is that the plugins were made that way in the first place. In
other words, blame the plugins' authors. How the title would be displayed
is dictated by the generate_content function and what is subsequently
assigned on the $title variable.

Therefore I don't think it would be feasible to force a configurable title
on the plugins from the system-wide configuration.

[gwilsonmail]

The reason is that the plugins were made that way in the first place. In
other words, blame the plugins' authors.

Then this is a design flaw! Which I doubt. I suspect it's just a piece of functionality that hasn't yet been implemented.

The title across the top of a plugin needs to match up with the blog/site design.

Take the categories sidebar - in one site they might be articles, in another they might be stories. To refer to them as categories in the sidebar doesn't make sense.

A field in the plugin's admin page would help if not a config file that would over-ride the plugin author's text would at least help.

There also needs to be a field that suppresses the output of the plugin's title - for sites that don't need the title displaying, or replace it with an image.

[garvinhicking]

It's no design flaw, but it should be up to the plugin authors to choose how the title is displayed and to make it configurable. The API is there, just the authors were to lazy so that the plugins would need to be modified.

Adding a field to the global page of the plugins would clutter up the interface way too much, and it's unneccessary.

So you can always edit the plugin file to change the titles as a fallback; BTW you could hide the titles easily via the CSS of your template, or by editing the sidebar_plugin.tpl file.

I am not arguing that titles should not be configurable; they should. But it's a hard work to modify all those plugins that do not yet allow it, and I think a global option for this is nonsense and clutters up too mach needed space in the plugin configuration.

Regards,
Garvin