I have been watching the development efforts for a plugin called ‘Custom Write Panel’ (CWP) for several months now. Nothing has changed. Development seems to be dead. ‘Custom Write Panel’ was a plugin that would seemingly take WordPress closer to CMS status by providing custom post input panels. As an example, I have a client that has an inventory of coins. To create a post and add all the custom fields to each by hand was a tedious process to say the least. What was needed was an input form for a coin post entry. This custom form would look like a reagular post except it would have input boxes/drop-downs/text-fields/radio-buttons to except data for the posts custom field entries i.e. coin-date, coin-denom, coin-mint and so forth.

With ‘CWP’ seamingly dead, I thought I would try one last search around for something similar. Low and below the heavens opened and I found ‘Fresh Post’. Based on development of ‘CWP’ and fully WordPress 2.5.x compatible I was able to create my first Write Panel last night for the coin inventory implementation with version .13 of ‘Fresh Post’. The client is ecstatic with the ease of use the ‘Write Panel’ will give them going forward. Management of their coin inventory has never been easier.

The continued development is being done by a site called ‘Freshout.us’. I look for good things from this group based on their list of features and features to come.

I did have an issue with this plugin because I use Windows Server 2003. It didn’t work properly. Actually it didn’t work at all. It installed but the Write Panel creation screen was unusable. The fix was to replace ALL occurrances of ‘<?=‘ with ‘<?php echo ‘ (sans quotes) within all .php files in the plugins root folder. Make note of the space after ‘echo ‘ in the replacement string. The commentor with the fix was using a WAMP install I am using a WIMP install so this should fix all Windows issues with the plugin.