SideNote: A Free Mango Blog Plugin

Posted By: Mark Aplet 12 Comments October 28, 2008

Back when I used BlogFusion as a CMS, it had a very simple utility called notes. Its function was simple. It added a note to your sidebar. I found this really useful when you need to alert your users to a new update or some problem without having to create a blog post about it. I wanted that feature back in mango blog so I created a very simple plugin called SideNote. It allows you to add html to your sidebar so you can use it however you want. Use SideNote to add an alert about upcoming maintenance or an outage, or maybe you need a donate now button? It's up to you.

Update

Thanks to the feedback, I have updated SideNote to include support for the WYSIWYG editor. You can now turn it off and on by clicking the toggle editor icon just like you can in the posts and pages editor. Now you can enjoy SideNote with a simpler more efficient editing experience.

Download SideNote Plugin

Plugin version:
1.2
Last Updated:
2009-10-13
Requires:
Mango Blog 1.3+
Auto-install URL:
http://www.visual28.com/assets/content/mango/sideNote-1.2.zip

Related Entries:

Tags: Freebies · Mango · Software · Plugins

12 comments so far ↓

  • 1 Adam Tuttle // Oct 29, 2008 at 5:51 AM
    Great idea, Mark! Until now, I've just been adding custom pods to whatever theme I'm using. I've long thought that Laura should add a "text" pod creator that's just a title field and a text field. It would be awesome if this would allow for multiple notes and the ability to move each note around in the sidebar by it's id.
  • 2 Adam Tuttle // Oct 29, 2008 at 6:01 AM
    Mark,

    It seems to be converting < object > and < embed > tags to <InvalidTag>. Is that your doing? Intentional?

    I was hoping to use this to temporarily add a flash widget to my sidebar, and this would preclude that working.
  • 3 Mark Aplet // Oct 29, 2008 at 7:30 AM
    Hey Adam, That sounds like it might be more of a function of the global script protection function, but I am not 100% sure. I did run a test on my server (CF8) and it renders the object and embed fine. Check out Ray Camden's post about this here. http://is.gd/587Q
  • 4 Pierre-Olivier Chassay // Apr 12, 2009 at 5:25 PM
    Hi Mark
    Just to let you know I made some modifications to your plugin.
    I add the possibilities to add a title for it.
    You can see it http://alturl.com/ophr
  • 5 Mark Aplet // Apr 14, 2009 at 9:33 AM
    Hey Pierre, I did not add a title as it may not be required for some users. If an individual needed to have a title you could easily add one and wrap it with an H2 tag. :) Glad you found it useful though. Enjoy!
  • 6 Xaveri // Apr 23, 2009 at 8:06 AM
    I'm interested in adding some ColdFusion conde into the note, to load dynamic content into it, but whenever I place the code in it, it is disabled. Can I can make this work? Thanks and good job.
  • 7 Michael Traher // Jul 20, 2009 at 9:30 AM
    Just a quick thank you for this plugin - just what I needed - I took out my code hacks in the sidebar and now its all nice an controlled from admin! Cheers
  • 8 Mark Aplet // Jul 20, 2009 at 2:08 PM
    @Michael - Good to hear that. That's exactly why I created the plugin. Glad you found it useful.
  • 9 Mark Mandel // Sep 30, 2009 at 12:58 AM
    Just started playing with this, looks good!

    I made one small change to your plugin.

    On the textarea 'sideNoteContent' in the admin, I added the class 'htmlEditor',so I had a wysiwyg editor to use when adding content (which is much easier).

    You may want to incorporate this as a setting / feature.

    Thanks for the plugin!!!
  • 10 Mark Aplet // Sep 30, 2009 at 9:53 AM
    Great Idea! I will create a preference setting for that.
  • 11 Mark Mandel // Dec 12, 2009 at 8:13 PM
    Just upgraded - works a treat :D

    I don't suppose you want to update this further, and allow for multiple sidenotes to created on a layout? :D

    (Would make my life lots easier) I'll owe you beer!
  • 12 Mark Aplet // Dec 13, 2009 at 9:06 PM
    @Mark Mandel - Thanks for the feedback. I'll put that on my to-do list.

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