I just can’t help it. I’m such a sucker for DIY Doctor Who stuff.1
Until now I had only known about Project Dalek for people who wanted to build replica Daleks. I suppose I should have known, but never thought to have looked it up, that there’s a whole website devoted to building TARDIS’s. This lady’s build log on that site is nearly as entertaining as her Youtube video.
Looking back at one’s code from years prior is like looking back at a junior high school picture of one’s self. I’m looking back at the code for my quick-and-dirty pie chart plugin and think, man, why did I write things THAT way?
In the 1,000 years since I wrote that plugin in 2009, I’ve been trying to learn and comply with best programming practices for WordPress plugins. As a result my current plugins tend to be stripped down, simple, don’t create unnecessary options, don’t create unnecessary tables, taxonomies, special post types, or those kinds of things. 1 Learning some Object Oriented programming along the way has been super helpful. By encapsulating your WordPress plugin code into a chunk of objected oriented programming, you reduce the likelihood that your plugins’ function and variable names will collide with those from WordPress or other potential plugins.
If you’re getting started or need to brush up on your WordPress plugin development skillz, you should definitely check out these awesome articles:2
I’d also recommend tinkering with jQuery and JSON, if you haven’t already. 3 I don’t know of any really good JSON tutorials, so if you do, please let me know so I can add it to this list.
I’m really happy to report that per the WordPress.org stats, this little post series plugin has been downloaded more than 100 times so far. That’s really awesome. And, now that I’ve figured out how to work this wacky SVN thing, I think it would be fun to release some of the other random little plugins I’ve developed over the last few years.
As of the latest version 1.4, the plugin is now easy to modify with some CSS added to your stylesheet. I could have added this as a text field option a settings page for the plugin, but I really like the stripped down simplicity of the plugin as is. Even with all the comment lines in the plugin, it is only 53 lines of code. If super short code were a goal1 I could probably cut that in half.2
Now I have to find some of my old plugins that others might find useful. I’ve got one for frame escaping, one for making pie charts… I know there are a few other random ones as well.
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