January 22, 2008

Writing a plugin can seem daunting if you have never done it before. There are so many great plugins out there that it often seems as though there are no topics left to cover, but plugins really don’t need to be fully featured, publicly released, solutions. You can do a lot with your own blog by developing relatively quick plugins. I want to encourage everyone who hosts their own WordPress blog to write a plugin no matter how small, just for themselves. That is the point of this series.

Each weekday for the next ten days I will be publishing a very short, quick, sample plugin. It won’t be available to download, but the code on the blog will be complete.

The name of the series is Quick n’ Dirty for a reason. These won’t bother with classes, objects, options, admin pages, databases (well maybe a little in the later ones) or that kind of malarkey, just one file, one hook, one function. This is a series for beginners, so just get stuck in.

To encourage things along a little I want to give some publicity to anyone that takes part in QuADFuN (quick and dirty fortnight), as the kids are calling it, so if you write your own quick and dirty plugin for your blog in the next two weeks, whether or not you use one of the examples, and publish a post about the code then come back to this post and explain what you did and I’ll add your name to a list on this page.

I’m also here to help with problems that come up when you are writing them, I am open to suggestions for quick and dirty plugins (I have only thought of four), and I’m open to guest entries, just drop me a note from the contact form.

I am convinced that you can do a lot with very little time or effort once you know of a few hooks and uses. I hope there is a demand to learn, and if there is I am here to help.

The first post will be tomorrow; you’ve been warned!!

Quick n’ Dirty Plugin Posts

List the posts links at the bottom of the post

Replace text in your post each time you save the post.

Prevent posts appearing on the home page.

Add a footer to the end of each post in your RSS feed.

Use WordPress’s Blogroll functionality to create a controllable navigation scheme with links for both casual visitors and registered users.

Theme your WordPress admin login page quickly and easily.

Build a page to report statistics using Google Charts.

Use random forms to thwart spambots.

Connect your blogs together by sending category requests to that category on your other blog.

Show visitors that your blog is offline while you tinker like a mad inventor.