WordPress plugins, I has them

Released January 12, 2009

The lolcat title reference aside, I have actually started producing WordPress plugins for myself. I’ve always wanted to make them, and so a while back I set aside a day (well two, once I got the hang of it) and learned. Granted I’ve still got a ways to go, but at least I’ve finally got my foot in the door with it all. The trick is to make sure to create things that are actually useful so that people will actually use them.

So as a result of my tooling around with WordPress, I’ve created two plugins for people to use.

RandomQuotr

In one of my older site lay­outs, I had a random quote dis­play­ing at the top of the page. The orig­i­nal logic was based very much on the Hello Dolly plugin that comes shipped with Word­Press. Even though I no longer use the func­tion within my layout, I still had the code and I felt that with a little revi­sion, this could be a psudo-​useful plugin.

So one morn­ing I did exactly that. Ran­domQuotr was born, and with it came the abil­ity to store all of the quotes within the WordPress data­base, as opposed to the PHP array that it started out as. Some more func­tion­al­ity was added to allow the selec­tion of spe­cific quotes.

PostDivider

I was a big advo­cate for using “the_excerpt()” for my sites layout, because it allowed me to split up my con­tent and work around my theme. the prob­lem is that using “the_excerpt()” sucks for many reasons:

  1. The field is HTML only.
  2. The field is tiny and cannot be re-​sized.
  3. It requires you to break up your most in a less than stel­lar way.

Enter Post­Di­vider.

Based on an old post of mine, Post­Di­vider allows the user to get the con­tent before and after the <!–MORE–> tag sep­a­rately. With Post­Di­vider, hooks are pro­vided to allow the Theme to dis­play the text directly (echo­ing it), or return­ing the con­tent as a value from the func­tion. If no <!–MORE–> tag is pro­vided, it will return the_excerpt() and the_content() respectively.

So far those are the only ones I’ve developed. I’ve got a couple ideas for more, when I get around to building my portfolio and the like.

I’ve also created a page that lists all of the plugins I have developed. They’re also hosted over on the wordpress.org plugins directory if you want to keep watch there.

I’m always looking for feedback or suggestions, so feel free to email me or leave a comment.

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