Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Category: Projects (Page 23 of 33)

Posts introducing, updating, and covering various projects to which I’ve contributed or that I maintain.

WP Audio Player Now on GitHub

Earlier this week, I released WP Audio Player – a simple plugin that makes it easy to embed audio files into your WordPress posts.

The plugin was graciously evaluated by Pippin Williamson on his personal blog, and several people on Twitter asked that I place the plugin on GitHub so that they can contribute.

As much as I am a fan of the open source model, I’ve never actually placed any of my plugins on GitHub – I just stick with the Subversion repository and managed bug reports and feature requests as they come in.

But I thought placing WP Audio Player on GitHub would be a fun – it’s helped my Boilerplates, so I figured it’d bode well for this plugin, too.

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WP Audio Player – Easily Embed Audio in Your WordPress Posts

As we’ve begun regularly publishing Hello Dolly and I’ve started running a few podcasts on Yet Another Blogging Podcast, I was finding the process a bit cumbersome for regularly embedding podcasts into our posts.

To be clear, I’ve been using the jQuery plugin by Codrops to embed audio, but it requires that I hop back and forth between the visual and the text editor when drafting posts.

In order to streamline the process a bit, I wrapped the jQuery plugin to make an easy to use WordPress audio player plugin.

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Introducing A Podcast About Blogging

Though I’m not planning to venture into doing any type of video blogging on discussing WordPress, there were a number of comments that I received on both of those posts as well as my post on three things I’ve learned from blogging that posed several interesting questions:

  • “I was hoping you could explain how you made that step and perhaps even give as an insight into your process.”
  • “Things like how you collect post ideas, how much time you spend writing, how difficult it was to get to and maintain this writing schedule and how much it has helped your career.”
  • “How much time you spend writing vs. “doing real work” (development)?”
  • “Do you even put aside your developer’s hat for a while and do nothing but write?”
  • “It’s very difficult to find things worth writing about and to continue despite little to no positive reinforcement.”
  • “Where do you find inspiration from to write? Do you browse any sites like Quora or Stack Overflow to get a sense of what’s popular, etc?”

After giving this some thought, I’ve decided to run a miniseries – for lack of a better term – of podcasts that talk about blogging, what I’ve learned from doing it, my process, and a couple of other tips I have for both aspiring and budding bloggers.

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Collapsible Menus For jQuery 1.1

This project has been retired, though the source code is still available on GitHub.

Collapsible Menus For jQuery

Collapsible Menus for jQuery is a small jQuery plugin that I released earlier this year. From the project’s original post:

Collapsible Menus is a jQuery plugin that makes it easy to create a collapsible menu using nested, unordered lists.

Easy enough, right?

It’s a small plugin that’s receives very few emails, comments, and issues; however, when they arise, I try to resolve them quickly. As of today, I’ve just released Collapsible Menus 1.1.

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Category Sticky Post and Tag Sticky Post Updates

As the release candidates of WordPress 3.5 were being release, I spent time updating my plugins to make sure they were fully compliant with the latest version. Specifically, I’ve been trying to patch any outstanding bugs and issues before working on new features.

Last week, I updated both Category Sticky Post and Tag Sticky Post.

Since the plugins are so similar, I’m covering updates for both plugins in this post.

What’s New?

Because both plugins serve the same purpose save for the taxonomy on which they operate, the updates are nearly identical. That said, only a single new feature has been introduced:

  • Added a function to dynamically create custom.css if the file doesn’t exist.

Since users often want to style the look and feel of their plugin to match the color scheme of their blog, this particular solution works as it conditionally introduces a stylesheet that will only be added if it doesn’t already exist.

That means that if an update occurs, a user won’t lose their styles.

Other Updates

The outstanding issues that exist that are now resolved are:

  • Updating localization files
  • Updating function calls to use updated PHP conventions
  • Verifying compatibility with WordPress 3.5

Obviously, relatively minor stuff.

What’s Up Next?

As of now, there’s nothing on the roadmap other than making sure the plugins continue to be compliant with WordPress best practices. They are narrowly scoped plugins that attempt to solve a very specific need without feature bloat.

That said, I’m always up for suggestions and comments so feel free to shoot them my way.

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