This blog was spawned as a result of a post on my other blog where I asked readers for a steer on my next project. One of the suggestions I received was for a wordpress plugin generator, where you could input the things you wanted your plugin to do, and it would give you a nice handy plugin file with the appropriate functions and hooks already working.
I thought it was a great idea and so I have been working on this for a few weeks.
I still have much work to do on the plugin generator, which I have named, Fun With Plugins, but I think I have got it to a position where it is actually useful and so I am opening it up for use and comments. If I were going to be all 2.0 about it I might call it a beta.
I am hoping to get feedback on features it should have, features that could work better, how well the guidance comments work etc.
The idea was given to me by Ronald Huereca. He has been instrumental in the development of this tool. As part of the Reader Appreciation Project he gave me the idea to ask readers what I should do next, he gave me the actual idea, he also kindly tested the generator at an earlier version, provided me with some sample code, and his series on writing Wordpress plugins on Devlounge was a key source of information, although I did choose to do some things a little differently.
Features still to come are:
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Hey, just posted about your plugin generator here – http://www.amitbhawani.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-generator-at-fun-with-wordpress/
Amit
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Jonic, I have added the wp_footer hook.
I have a few people suggest letting people add their own content in different ways. While it certainly makes sense I think that one of the advantages of this is that you can download a plugin that, in theory, should just work. This gives a great baseline and means it is easy to test what is broken.
If people could add their own content that may cease to be the case and it may be difficult sometimes to figure out if there is a bug in the generator or in the content they have typed in.
I haven’t ruled it out, but I am considering it very carefully.
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Great work man, I can see this being really useful for plugin developers…
I’d like to nomiate the wp_footer hook, or give the user the option to type in a hook/filter of their own. I’m subscribing to your feed to see how this turns out. It seems to be working out great so far :)
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[...] have Wordpress fun? Let’s see how hard it is for you to develop your own plugin, with this plugin making tool: go there, think of a plugin, make it and blog about it with a link to this post, so I get your [...]
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[...] Fun with plugins tool [...]
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[...] the more advanced things plugin authors take advantage of including localization and admin menus. Future versions promise Ajax support, style support, client side scripting, and an automatically generated WP Extend readme [...]