Tag Archives: wordpress plugins

Anti-Virals

Posted on by

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.

Default Series Title
  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

Posted on by

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. [↩]