WordPress.org

How do I ask for help?

1. Search the forums and post in a relevant thread if one exists.
2. Always tag your post with WP-dTree 3.0
3. State your problem succintly, provide a link!
4. If it broke after you changed a setting, let us know this!
5. If it's a style problem, read on...

Why does WP-dTree look horrible on my blog?

99% of the time, it's your theme that breaks the layout. Run the default WP theme (Kubric) to quickly confirm this. Then follow these simple steps (in your theme) to find the cause.

1. Get the Web Developer Plugin for firefox.
2. Right-click anywhere on your blog, select Web Developer -> CSS -> Edit CSS and fiddle around with anything related to the sidebar, images, lists or links. Changes are applied in realtime so you'll know when you've struck gold.

If the fix is something that can and should be supplied by WP-dTree itself, please post the fix on the forums.

Why does dTree timeout on Internet Explorer?

It's an inherent limitation with the IE Javascript engine. dTree does a lot of string juggling, and any large-ish amount of data will take a while to get through.

There is no hard limit, but my experience suggest that IE chokes around 110-120K (WP-dTree prints its size in your blog source). In practice this is rarely a problem, but if you hit the limits it's probably with a category tree and list posts on. Keep each post in a single category (use tags instead!) to keep your category tree slim.

Why should I disable unused trees?

Even if you never display the tree, WP-dTree will create and store it every time you add or edit content on your blog. By disabling unused trees you can save your server from going through that effort. If you've got a large(ish) number of posts, this will speed up posting and editing quite noticeably.

How does the 3.x fork improve performance of WP-dTree?

Instead of generating all the trees on every visit, 3.x employs caching - building the trees only when you add or alter content on your blog. The result is a tremendous load reduction from previous versions; the devsite (~360 posts, Kubrik theme) went from 411 to 18 queries (!) to display the main page.

Of course, caching also yelds a significant reduction in how much processing is needed for each visit. Unless you activate Open to requested node, all WP-dTree does is to print a static string.

Version 3.3 brought optimizations to the dtree javascript itself too, further reducing the amount of data to store and transmit to create the trees.

Can I change the images used by WP-dTree?

The images are all stored in the 'wp-dtree-30/dtree-img/' directory. You can change them if you like. Just remember to keep the names the same, or you'll break the script.

Can I help you with anything?

Yes please!

We desperately need a proper overhaul of the admin interface. It's not standards compliant and it looks terrible in WP 2.7. If you (unlike me...) are a proper front-end developer - feel free to send me a patch.

Same goes for CSS and styling - I really need someone to have a look at it and make it proper. Compliant, fail safe, robust, sane.

For coders, I'd like help on optimizing what hooks WP-dTree uses and how they're used. I see a lot of potential in the "new" variable hooks, but they're poorly documented. The plugin should always fire when (relevant) content is edited, but we should only run the methods necessary. We shouldn't re-generate Links, Pages and Archive-trees when the user adds a new category to the database.

Finally - if you've got more money than time - I always appreciate a (used) book.