One of the most useful thing on forms is an “autoselect” function. How is this work? Let’s assume that you have a standard search box:

When textbox is focused you can do three things:

1. Do nothing. Let the user to delete all text. Not good for lazy people, right?
2. Autoclear box. But if user want only to change a letter (typo) or add another word, then he should re-type all things. Not good for usability.
3. Autoselect box content. Is just like the user double clicks on the text. How can you do this? Read further to see

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var initValue;
$(document).ready(function(){
$(':text').each(function(){
	$(this).focus(function(){
		initValue = $(this).attr('value');
		$(this).select();
	});
	$(this).blur(function(){
		if($(this).val() == ''){
			$(this).val(initValue);
		}
	});
});
});

What is the best thing with this? Well… If an user just leave the text box blank, that form is auto filled with previous value.

Pretty nice, huh? Well… I think is pretty useful too

Today i spent some time trying to figure how to get existing (and also used) tags from wordpress and using in admin panel as a combo box, for my brand new theme Wordnewz.

The return of get_tags() function was some kind of array but, because of my skills (not) in PHP i spend WAY too much time to go figure what to do. The initial result of get_tags() function is:

Array
(
    [0] => stdClass Object
        (
            [term_id] => 28
            [name] => Featured
            [slug] => featured
            [term_group] => 0
            [term_taxonomy_id] => 29
            [taxonomy] => post_tag
            [description] =>
            [parent] => 0
            [count] => 6
        )
)

And i only needed [name] and [slug]. Ofcourse, like a smart guy that i am, i pointed my browser on wordpress codex where i found… NOTHING. Nothing about this function… Great. Let’s try various stuff and google it for any ideas. And i found a PHP function get_object_vars for easy conversion. After this, all was GREAT. I use it like this:

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$allTags = get_tags();
foreach($allTags as $thisTags) {
		$thisTag = get_object_vars($thisTags);
		echo '<option value="'.$thisTag['slug'].'">'.$thisTag['name'].'</option>\n';
}

And it WORKS like a charm. I posted this thing because i didn’t found too much references for stdClass Object or get_tags() Wordpress function.