A couple of months ago, I had the oportunity to attend an API Hackday event in Bloomington. At the event, I created some cool WordPress tools using Twilio (more on that at a later date), but I ended up having some free time (because Twilio’s API is so easy to use!), so I wrote another plugin called WP SendGrid using the SendGrid API.
A couple of years ago I released a plugin called “Minimum Password Length“. It’s been pretty popular, mostly thanks to some link love by David Peralty. Ever since I released the plugin, I’ve been thinking “wouldn’t it be nice to do something similar, but harness the WordPress password strength meter?”. Well, I finally took the time to do that, and so we have the Minimum Password Strength plugin.
This is also a special plugin, because it’s the first one I’ve simultaneously published on GitHub and my site. I plan on uploading my other plugins to GitHub at some point (in fact, I uploaded Short Comment Filter, another popular plugin, a few days ago), but Minimum Password Strength is the first one that’s there from the start.
I’m working with GitHub for a school project this quarter. It’s the first time I’ve done anything but dabble with Git, so it took some time for me to figure it out. The commands weren’t that bad, because they’re pretty similar to SVN (which I work with from the command line all the time), but getting set up in Windows was a bit of a pain. Turns out if you install Git for Windows with the “Use PuTTY” option, it uses PuTTY ssh keys to authenticate with Git. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except PuTTY uses a special private key format, and I already have a keypair that I use on my Mac. I finally figured out how to convert that to PuTTY format using PuTTYgen, and then I figured out that I needed to start Pageant and manually add the key in order to use it for authentication.
Anyway, despite all this pain, I decided to start using GitHub to host my open source WordPress plugins. This gives me some more experience with Git, plus it provides public source control, which is better for open source projects than the private SVN repository I was already using.
Long story short, if you want to see what I’ve uploaded so far, check out my GitHub page.
Here’s the extra info for my talk.
The slides are available here.
The WP_Ajax class is available here.
The Simple Post Ratings plugin is available here.
I’ll also post a link to the video on WordPress.tv when it becomes available. EDIT: Here it is
WordPress displays post states on post list tables to indicate that a post has a special condition. It’s possible to hook into that list of states and add your own.
Dougal Campbell published an article the other day suggesting that the way many themes are handling the new Post Formats feature is wrong. While I completely agree that Post Formats shouldn’t be handled with giant if/else blocks, I’m not sure the proposed solution is the best option either. Here’s why.
I’ve had this concept in my mind for over a year now, and I finally decided to implement it.
When working on different projects, I sometimes have problems with plugins interfering with each other (or at least making certain features difficult to test). I can always go though and enable and disable the correct plugins and themes to get the environment I want, but this can be tedious when there are lots of plugins.
[Obligatory comment about my lack of posts and my intentions to be better in the future]
I’ve been following the development of WordPress 3.0 more closely than previous versions, and one of the features that has intrigued me the most is the new theme being developed. Twenty Ten is shaping up to be an elegant and innovative theme and I’m excited to see what it becomes before the final release of WordPress 3.0.