Tag Archives: WP Plugins

Looking for some plugin strategy feedback

June 26, 2006 – 11:30 pm

As it relates to how my plugins look, my new approach (for the ones I’m getting ready to release shortly) is to make them look decent out of the box, in the default WordPress 2.0 theme, and then just add enough in the way of IDs and class names to make it as easy as possible for people to customize if they aren’t using the default theme.

My thinking on this is that I don’t really think there’s any good way to provide for many complicated style rules out of the box without making it more difficult to customize when the user does want to use an alternate theme. So, what I think the best approach might be is to make it OK (without much or any CSS) for people who are totally uncomfortable messing with their themes, and then for those who ARE into that, they may have to tweak it a little bit to make it fit, but they will have to do that on everything; that’s just part of choosing a different theme.

What do you guys think?

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Also tagged | Comments (2)

Tada!

April 6, 2006 – 12:24 am

After all the talk of lists on here this evening, I found myself inspired to go ahead and create a new WordPress plugin for list management (ironically bumping it ahead “in the list” of all the other things I’ve been meaning to write lately).

Without further ado, I present the Ta-da List Plugin!

The basic idea is that this will allow you to display any of your lists that you manage in the very handy (and free) Ta-da List application, brought to you by the great guys over at 37signals.

Technical details and important compatibility notes:
This plugin basically takes the RSS feed (copy/paste the url from the link in Ta-da list) from any of your lists and transforms it (using XSLT) into a basic HTML list which you can insert into your sidebar or wherever else you choose.

With a simple echo jbGetTadaList("http://yourid.tadalist.com/lists/feed/123?token=456"); inserted into your theme, you will see the list title (in an H1 element) followed by the list itself. The relevant CSS class names are “TadaListTitle”, “TadaList”, and “TadaListItem” - for styling purposes. Pretty easy, eh?

While this is very handy and one of many examples of why XSLT is so useful, there is a catch: your web server must support performing XSLT transformations in PHP, specifically by using the PHP extension that supports such transformations. Sadly, this is not enabled on some hosting providers, and so you are pretty much out of luck if you don’t have the option of installing it on your server. If you do have such access to your server, here is a guide, if you’re feeling lucky/brave.

Ironically, even the server that this blog is currently on does not support it, since I haven’t moved this site over to my VPS server yet (which I can install whatever I want on). That move is one of the many items on my list that remains unaccomplished, but as soon as I do, I’ll add a demo list to this blog.

Because I imagine this will be a significant issue for many users, I do plan to release a non-XSLT version of this plugin at some point in the future, which will avoid any such dependencies (probably by using plain, old-fashioned, boring string manipulation). But, until then, enjoy if you can!

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Also tagged , , | Comments (2)