Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More

Category: Projects (Page 25 of 37)

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

Tag Sticky Post Updated To 1.2

Earlier this week, I received a following forum notification in my inbox regarding Tag Sticky Post:

I’ve downloaded the plugin Tag Sticky Post that will allow me to stick posts depending on which tag I’m currently browsing in my blog. The tag that will be checked is from the post’s custom_field “tag_sticky_post”. So, if I go inside the post and set post “A” to stick on tag “1”, if I go to http://www.myblog.com/tag/1 the post “A” will be shown on the top with a custom css class (to highlight it). So far so good.

The problem is that the plugin can’t seem to work when I’m browsing archives for 2 tags at the same time, like the example I gave above:

Example: http://www.myblog.com/tag/tag1+tag2

You can view the entire post here.

This prompted an update to the plugin that I’ll discuss in more length in another post, but first note that this particular use case provided a perfect example of the type of enhancement that fit with the vision of the plugin.

So yesterday, I officially released Tag Sticky Post 1.2.

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jQuery Konami Code: Add The Cheat Code To Your Site

Be sure to check out the latest release of the plugin!

One of the things that I love about working on side projects is that they can be just as complex or simple, or as fun or mundane as you want them to be.

Case in point: A couple of years ago when 8BIT was first getting started, we had a really simple landing page, but we had the idea to incorporate something fun.

Considering we all group up during the 8-bit era of video games, we opted to incorporate the Konami code into our site. So I wrote a small jQuery plugin that makes it really easy to include the cheat code into your site or web application.

Simply put, it’s the jQuery Konami Code.

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A Look at The UI Design Process in WordPress Plugins

I’m no designer. I don’t aspire to be one, nor do I claim to be one that; however, I am interested in the topic and enjoy seeing the work that others do as well as following blogs, articles, books, etc. on the topic.

Though user interface design is a bit of a different field, it hits much closer to home for me than other types of design. After all, a user interface is basically the face of the code that we’re writing.

And if we’re not careful, then we’re going to continue perpetuating the stereotype that developers do not care about design.

I’ve spoken previously about sharing case studies on WordPress projects, and though I don’t have a full project to share right now, I thought it might be fun to look at some I’ve been working on and the evolution of a particular user interface that evolved from a first pass, to discussion, then from mockup, to implementation.

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Tipsy Social Icons Now on GitHub

One of the things that I appreciate most about the open source community is the sense of collaboration that comes with sharing your work.

Case in point: This morning, I received the following tweet from someone who wanted to contribute to Tipsy Social Icons.

Sure, all plugins in the WordPress Plugins Repository are open source by nature, but GitHub makes collaboration that much easier, so I was happy to oblige.

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Writing a Plugin (and Doing It Live!)

Earlier this week, Pippin Williamson (of Pippin’s Plugins) sent out the following tweet:

Neat idea, right? Have he and Andrew Norcross – a fellow WordPress developer – create a plugin during the course of a WordCamp that could be released for free.

So I tossed my idea into the ringer:

You can actually read the entire conversation here.

This has been a plugin that I’ve wanted for a long time, and I assume anyone who’s actually maintained a blog for a significant amount of time would do the same.

As it turns out, I’m going to be joining Pippin and Norcross in writing a plugin for exactly this. And we’re gonna do it live.

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