Simple Series – Half-Life; Market Research

I’m wondering at what point will the downloads on this plugin plateau.  Whatever the eventual baseline download rate, I would suspect that speaks to the amount of maximum market share that is possible for a plugin that performs these functions.1  I would think that downloads would spike when I release a new version of the plugin.  Given that I released about five updates to this plugin the first day, I would assume some of those initial downloads were duplicative.

As far as rankings go, at this time this plugin is #5 on WordPress.org’s plugin search page, #5 inside WordPress’s internal “Add New” plugins search page, and no where to be seen in the Google rankings.  Looking at Google Keywords, it appears that there’s no small amount of search traffic for the keywords “WordPress series.”  There’s some 200,000 global monthly searches.  One of the reasons I’m following this so closely is that I’ve had a few ideas for plugins that I could sell.2

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

  1. 1/26/2012: 1 download
  2. 1/27/2012: 99 downloads
  3. 1/28/2012: 37 downloads
  4. 1/29/2012: 20 downloads

What will tomorrow bring?

Posts about Simple Series (with a list created by this very plugin!)
  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

  1. I promise I won’t subject your RSS feed to my obsessive stats checking.  Much of the time I use this blog as a way to document/save/organize information that is probably really only interesting to me. [↩]
  2. A brother’s gotta earn, right? [↩]

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!)
  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
  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!)
  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
  1. And it isn’t [↩]
  2. Obviously, I’m not going to do this since it would make the code next to illegible [↩]

Now Simple Series will also add the series list to RSS feeds too!

How awesome is that?!

Posts about Simple Series (with a list created by this very plugin!)
  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

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!)
  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
  1. Of course, now people are going to start e-mailing me with problems… [↩]

Simple Series WordPress Plugin

I’ve written a new WordPress plugin specifically designed to let you simply and easily create a series of related posts.  You can download Simple Series here.

What does “Simple Series” do?

Simple Series uses a WordPress shortcode to associate your posts together.  All you have to do is use the same shortcode in all of the posts you want to associate together and the plugin does the rest.  It will automatically find all of the posts with the same shortcode, organize them by publication date, and put them together in a professional and easy to read format.  If you wish to change the format, you can just add your own custom CSS to your theme.

How does “Simple Series” work?

Easy!  Just add the shortcode to each of the posts you want to put in the series.  Inside the shortcode you will need to specify the title for the series.  Like so:

This Is My Series Title
  1. Simple Series WordPress Plugin

What if I add more posts later?

No problem!  The “Simple Series” plugin will always update the series lists in each of your posts whenever you publish a new post.  The newest post will always be added to the series in chronological order, by publication date.  You can see an example of what it looks like here in my own DrawBot series.

I have more questions!

Cool!  Please leave a comment to this post or send me an e-mail!

Posts about Simple Series (with a list created by this very plugin!)
  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

A nifty little WordPress plugin…

The idea for this little plugin has been rattling around in my head for a little while now.  It clocks in at less than 60 lines of code, including comments, and makes it easy to create a “series” for posts.

As I’ve been blogging about my (mis)adventures in building a DrawBot, I’ve been updating each post to contain a link back to all of the prior posts in the series.  However, if someone were to find one of the first posts – they wouldn’t see a link to a later post.  That is, unless I update all the posts.  That’s not really much of an option, since I’ve racked up 23 posts in less than 19 days. 12

This plugin is actually super simple.  Here’s what it does:

  1. Add a “post meta” tag for the current post with the same key as whatever you want to name the post series
  2. Query the database for all posts with the same post meta key as the one for the current post
  3. Output an ordered chronological list of all posts in with the same post meta key as the one for the current post

The simplicity of this plugin are actually some of it’s strongest features.  Unlike a lot of other series plugins out there, it doesn’t create any unnecessary tables in your WordPress database.  There are no settings to mess with, no CSS to fiddle with, no ugly standard formatting to overcome.

The only downside I can perceive is that if you delete the shortcode from a plugin, it will still leave the post-meta attached to the post and the post will still appear in the series.  If you leave the shortcode in and don’t specify a series title, it will delete the post-meta.  I suppose I could include a little button in the interface to delete the post from the series, but really, it’s just not going to be used that often.

Anyhow, this is something that I’ve wanted to have for a long time – I just hadn’t gotten around to building it yet.

Posts about Simple Series (with a list created by this very plugin!)
  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
  1. I’ve got a lot to say. [↩]
  2. And, actually, that’s just 23 posts on this one topic.  I’ve probably blogged an equal amount over on the MakerBot blog, with a few totally random additional posts here. [↩]

WordPress makes all the difference

…I don’t care what FakeGrimlock says.1

I finally updated the WordPress installation on this other blog of mine. 2  I’ve more or less neglected that other blog for almost two years – about as long as this blog has been in existence.   ;)  In any case, one side effect of not having an updated WordPress installation is that that other blog couldn’t take advantage of all the cool new features that make writing a blog much easier.

I’ve been using WordPress for about 4.5 years now and it has come an amazingly long way in this time.  The ability to quickly search for and add links to prior posts is pretty huge.  Anyhow, my point with this is that creating a post with a newer installation of WordPress is so much easier that I might actually start blogging on that other site more. 3 4

  1. No matter how hurtful it is… [↩]
  2. Yeah, I know.  Three blogs?!  It’s true!  But, it’s far less frequently updated – more on this in a second [↩]
  3. But, believe me, it’s far less interesting. [↩]
  4. As if that were possible amirite?! [↩]

It feels good to finally get this over with…

I have this other1 website for which I’ve been avoiding upgrading WordPress. 2  This is basically a developer sin, I know.  I wrote some plugins and some features for this particular website and my concern was that by upgrading I might break some parts of the site.

Well, tonight I just upgraded WordPress along with all the plugins and themes.  I’ve kicked the tires a little and I think everything is okay.  There’s still a little apprehension about having missed something …  but that will pass.  I’m actually quite relieved to have finally done this.

  1. Mysterious [↩]
  2. It’s an uninteresting niche business website – you’re not missing anything. [↩]