Most people who read this blog probably don’t come here because of the WordPress plugins I’ve been writing. I’ll briefly explain. The software that I run this site with these days is called WordPress. You can write plugins for it that provide extra functionality.
One of the plugins I’ve written is called Exhibit. Exhibit is a pretty cool photo display plugin. With it, you can attach any number of photos to an individual post, and it will create thumbnails and popup links automatically. The cool little file picker makes it easy to upload and select files from your site. Short of embedding a dedicated gallery script, I would say that it’s the best thing out there for displaying photos in WordPress.
The other two “serious” plugins I’ve written were really proofs of concept. They weren’t really designed with the public in mind, just a curious, “Can I do it this way?” The first is called Adhesive, which allows you to mark a post as “sticky”, forcing it to appear at the top of the post listing no matter when it was written. The second is called EzStatic, which allows you embed a different page from the site into the post area, completely replacing the posts that normally appear.
The task of supporting these plugins is pretty daunting, but it’s not turning out too bad so far. I’m only mildly piled over by email so far.
There are a couple of things that I would like to do via plugin yet before I retire from plugin writing. First, I need a way to draw directly on the site. I was to scribble with the mouse (or my drawing pad) directly into the web site and embed the resulting scribble as an image in my post.
Another thing I would like to do is have a good Flash audio player. I don’t want to host whole playlists of MP3s, necessarily, but I wouldn’t mind putting one up in a post now and then. This is probably fairly easily accomplished with another plugin I wrote (but didn’t officially “release”) that creates new Quicktags buttons for the editor, but would still need a decent Flash applet for playing MP3s.
I would like to embed an RSS aggregator, but I’m looking for something that fits into one file. I don’t want to have to drop Magpie in there. I just want one file that gets the RSS from a bunch of sites, caches and displays it. And that’s it. I don’t want FoF. I don’t want ZFeeder. I want a single-file solution. It would be nice if it collated the sources chronologically, too. Then it’s just one-stop news for me in the morning. Man, what will I do with all the extra time?
