CompFight plugin, with 100% more awesome

Heart

Heart

I cannot express to you how much I just love this new CompFight plugin. 1  Snagging images off of CompFight/Flickr and dropping them into a post is so freaking easy now.  This is definitely going to become one of my stock-plugins for a fresh WordPress installation.  I’m happy to say that I contributed a small bit of code to this very very awesome plugin.  Since that comment, my modification of their code was merged into the main plugin.  I’ve also added a few small tweaks to my version of this plugin.  By modifying the javascript file very slightly, my copy of this plugin also:

  • Adds a caption, that includes the same text as the original photo on Flickr
  • Centers the image, using WordPress’s tags
  • Makes the photo credit part of the text.  I like to include the photo credit using slightly different language.  At some point I’ll get around to modifying the plugin so that I can save my format as a setting.

Admittedly, these implementations are just a little bit buggy – I just hacked those bits in without really doing any serious testing on them.  Once I have kicked the tires on this code a little, I’ll post it to the plugin’s page.  If you want to take a look at it before then, just drop me a line.

Sometimes the right post just needs the right picture – I’ve actually had a lack of a good photo hold up a post before.  I’m happy

  1. Photo Credit: seyed mostafa zamani via Compfight [↩]

ShrimpTest – how to fix incompatibilities with WordPress v3.3

ShrimpTest is a WordPress plugin with a LOT of promise.  Basically, it is an A/B testing tool for WordPress.  The plugin author, Mitcho, does a great job of explaining A/B testing and why it is important.  If you are already familiar with A/B testing, you can skip ahead to 16:03 in the video to see a demo of Mitcho presenting the plugin

Unfortunately, and this is truly a shame, the plugin also suffers from an almost complete lack of development and updating.  There must have been some change in WordPress v3.2 that stopped the plugin from working.  The effect was that the “A/B” icon in the rich text editor was missing.  Fortunately, someone figured out a work around.  The super quickest way to apply this change to the plugin is to do the following:

  1.  Make sure you’re logged into your WordPress website of choice
  2. Navigate to `http://[DOMAIN].com/wp-admin/plugin-editor.php?file=shrimptest/plugins/variant-shortcode/tinymce.js&plugin=shrimptest%2Fshrimptest.php`
  3. The second line down reads:
    1. ”     tinymce.PluginManager.requireLangPack(‘variant_shortcode’);”
  4. Comment out this line by adding two slashes before the code as follows:
    1. “//     tinymce.PluginManager.requireLangPack(‘variant_shortcode’);”
  5. Click “Update File”

You’re done!  Now you should be able to see the icon in your WordPress rich text editor.

Who is tracking you? Collusion plugin for FireFox

If you want to see something that is simultaneously disturbing and ego-inflating, check out the Collusion plugin for FireFox. 1 A friend of mine e-mailed me the link to the LifeHacker post discussing it.  If you want to cut to the chase, the link to the Collusion plugin is right here.  After web surfing and blogging for about an hour, the little web it’s drawn so far is a little scary.

 

  1. In a perverse way, it is slightly ego-inflating because I’m clearly so very important to ALL these companies! [↩]

WordPress plugin – OCD Plugin Stats

OCD Plugin Stats WordPress plugin screenshot

OCD Plugin Stats WordPress plugin screenshot

I’ve just published another WordPress plugin called OCD Plugin Stats.  This isn’t a plugin that would really interest most people.  If you’re a WordPress plugin developer and like seeing the stats for your plugins, OCD Plugin Stats will let you monitor all the stats for all of your plugins in one convenient location in your WordPress dashboard.

Unless you publish your own plugins, I can’t imagine anyone would be terribly interested in such a thing.  My reason for making this plugin was that (a) I found it useful, so perhaps others would too and (b) I wanted to learn how to create a WordPress dashboard widget.

Plugin Considerations

When designing/writing software, or I suppose any kind of engineering for that matter, there is always a tension between features and complexity.  I really want this Simple Series WordPress plugin to be simple and easy to use.  But, as I use it more and more I find there are some possible features that I wouldn’t mind having.

For example, my DrawBot series is at 43 posts at this moment.  The problem is that each post, no matter how short, now has an entire screen-length’s worth of a list for the series. 1  Now, there are several possible ways to handle this:

  • I suppose when I’m looking to design a UI, the most important things to focus on is what would the user expect to see and happen.  It certainly makes sense for there to be a uniform series list in every post.  But, it seems slightly inelegant to have it that way for every single post when you’re looking at an entire page.
  • I could modify the plugin so that it would only create a list once per page, rather than once per post.  I suppose subsequent instances could then provide a single link to the series list in the initial post.  I think this would be non-intuitive as a person navigated the page.
  • I could modify the plugin so that it only showed the current post plus X posts before and after where X is some arbitrary number I choose.  (Although, I’d probably make it user specifiable).  I’d have to dig into some fancy scmancy CSS to define a different start-number for the HTML ordered list, but this isn’t a huge problem.  Ideally, it would say there are Y prior posts and Z subsequent posts as well.  Then again, it is really helpful (at least to me) to be able to click back up or down through a series list.

Perhaps the optimal result is something in between?

  • On a page consisting of a single post, the entire list should be displayed.
  • On a page consisting of multiple posts, the subsequent lists should be truncated in some meaningful fashion.  Perhaps the last and subsequent X posts, with a little sentence indicating Y more prior posts and Z more subsequent posts.  When you click on the “Y more prior posts” it could take you to the first instance of the series list on that page and when you click on the “Z more subsequent posts” it could take you to the next post listed in the series on the first instance of the series list on that page. 2
  • Sadly, this system would not really change much for the RSS feed readers.
Posts about Simple Series (with a list created by this very plugin!)
← Simple Series - Half-Life; Market Research
  1. A nifty little WordPress plugin...
  2. i find i want to add more posts in some random series, just so i can use my new plugin
  3. Simple Series WordPress Plugin
  4. My first published WordPress plugin! Simple Series!
  5. This is a test of the Simple Series post system... This is only a test
  6. Now Simple Series will also add the series list to RSS feeds too!
  7. ZOMG! Simple Series is going viral!
  8. Simple Series with SEO! after just one day
  9. Anti-Virals
  10. Simple Series - Half-Life; Market Research
  11. Plugin Considerations
  1. I can’t even imagine how much text is devoted to just the series list on those DrawBot posts in your RSS feed. [↩]
  2. Um.  This sounded a lot clearer in my head as I typed it than it probably reads. [↩]

Anti-Virals

Here’s the WordPress.org plugin download stats for “Simple Series with SEO!” for the first three days.

  1. 1/26/2012: 1 download1
  2. 1/27/2012: 99 downloads2
  3. 1/28/2012: 37 downloads3

It looks after being bumped from the newest plugins slot, the downloads dropped precipitously.  So much for going viral, money, and fame, eh?

Actually, I’m happy to have helped out a 100 people or so.  I also think a lot more people will end up using this plugin over time.  The alternatives, while very good, are more difficult to use and do tend to add a lot of other stuff into your WordPress installation.

Posts about Simple Series (with a list created by this very plugin!)
← Simple Series with SEO! after just one daySimple Series - Half-Life; Market Research →
  1. A nifty little WordPress plugin...
  2. i find i want to add more posts in some random series, just so i can use my new plugin
  3. Simple Series WordPress Plugin
  4. My first published WordPress plugin! Simple Series!
  5. This is a test of the Simple Series post system... This is only a test
  6. Now Simple Series will also add the series list to RSS feeds too!
  7. ZOMG! Simple Series is going viral!
  8. Simple Series with SEO! after just one day
  9. Anti-Virals
  10. Simple Series - Half-Life; Market Research
  11. Plugin Considerations
  1. That was me installing it in another blog! [↩]
  2. And a blog ain’t one [↩]
  3. I have nothing clever to say about this. [↩]

Articles on writing WordPress Plugins

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.

  1. Admittedly, I’m not really shooting for super ambitious plugins either. [↩]
  2. Mostly stolen from the WordPress Codex! [↩]
  3. I only use JSON for passing data from the browser to the server via AJAX and then decoding into a PHP object. [↩]

Simple Series with SEO! after just one day

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.

Posts about Simple Series (with a list created by this very plugin!)
← ZOMG! Simple Series is going viral!Anti-Virals →
  1. A nifty little WordPress plugin...
  2. i find i want to add more posts in some random series, just so i can use my new plugin
  3. Simple Series WordPress Plugin
  4. My first published WordPress plugin! Simple Series!
  5. This is a test of the Simple Series post system... This is only a test
  6. Now Simple Series will also add the series list to RSS feeds too!
  7. ZOMG! Simple Series is going viral!
  8. Simple Series with SEO! after just one day
  9. Anti-Virals
  10. Simple Series - Half-Life; Market Research
  11. Plugin Considerations
  1. And it isn’t [↩]
  2. Obviously, I’m not going to do this since it would make the code next to illegible [↩]

My first published WordPress plugin! Simple Series!

This may seem silly, but I’m really happy with having published my very first plugin on WordPress.org.

My Simple Series plugin lets you easily create and helps you automatically maintain a list of posts.  I started writing this plugin because all of the existing ones seemed really clunky and over-engineered.  There’s no need for extra tables in WordPress, brand new taxonomies, or special system requirements.  If you can fire up any recent version of WordPress, you should be able to use this plugin without a problem. 1

As much of a WordPress fanboy as I am, I’ve never actually shared a plugin on the WordPress.org repository.  It was simultaneously easier and more difficult than I thought it would be.  The page that discusses how you can contribute your plugin and talks about “checking out” files makes absolutely no mention of how you’re supposed to do this!

Apparently you require a program to connect to the WordPress SVN to check out the file and commit changes.  On the advice of Schmarty I’m using TortoiseSVN.  Once that was installed and a sub-directory selected, it was relatively easy to commit changes.  If you haven’t tried it before, this whole SVN thing feels like a clunky slow version of FTP.

Posts about Simple Series (with a list created by this very plugin!)
← Simple Series WordPress PluginThis is a test of the Simple Series post system... This is only a test →
  1. A nifty little WordPress plugin...
  2. i find i want to add more posts in some random series, just so i can use my new plugin
  3. Simple Series WordPress Plugin
  4. My first published WordPress plugin! Simple Series!
  5. This is a test of the Simple Series post system... This is only a test
  6. Now Simple Series will also add the series list to RSS feeds too!
  7. ZOMG! Simple Series is going viral!
  8. Simple Series with SEO! after just one day
  9. Anti-Virals
  10. Simple Series - Half-Life; Market Research
  11. Plugin Considerations
  1. Of course, now people are going to start e-mailing me with problems… [↩]