February 5, 2008

The last ten (working) days have been fairly intense as a result of my Quick and Dirty posts series. I definitely underestimated the task of writing a plugin, albeit a very basic one, every day for ten days. Having said that however it was a fun process.

Plugins usually come about following a eureka moment, not always while bathing, where an iced gem of an idea hits you and you begin frantically coding to get the bones down while you remember what it is you want to do. But when you promise to produce one every day you need to find a method of creating that moment. It has a way of really focussing your mind.

Sometimes I had that moment, sometimes I looked through hook after hook looking for one I could exploit without needing several others to go with it, and often I wasn’t sure I would have something to publish. Thankfully it seems to have gone well; although I am glad I can stop now.

It’s fair to say that there are plugins already out there that do what the things I produced, so most weren’t original, but that wasn’t really the point. The point was to show just how easy it can be.

So now that is finished what next? Well I have a few projects I am midway through that you will be seeing over the next few days, weeks, or possibly months.

Firstly I have agreed to help out with testing a new plugin. The Comment Sorter plugin is being developed by Ronald at the Reader Appreciation Project. You should see an option beneath the comment header that will let you sort the comments I get on this post. If you use it and find it useful, or have any other thoughts on it, please comment here so I can pass that on to Ronald.

Secondly, over the next few days I intend to have a new collaborative feature aimed at identifying the most important standards for plugin authors. If you want to throw in the rules you would most like to see in a voluntary set of standards then you can let me know about them using my plugin standards notification page.

Finally I am working on a theme at the moment. It will be a free (Freemium?) theme but it is very adventurous in terms of functionality so I’m not sure how long it will be. At some point in future I will be asking for volunteers to try it out if they have a local test environment and are familiar with object oriented PHP, Plugins, CSS, and such things. The timescale for that is hazy at the moment; however, I am always interested in hearing ideas for the perfect theme.

On that note if anyone can point me to a really good resource for internationalising themes I would be most grateful.

TTFN.

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