Tag: plugins

Using WordPress to track my reading

A while back I put together a small plugin for tracking the books I read. Today I put the code up on Github in case it’s useful to others. You can see a live demo of it on my reading page.

The plugin uses a custom post type for books which lets you track each book as a new post. There’s also a custom taxonomy to keep track of the authors you’re reading as well.

I also wanted to create a repository for the notes I take when reading. I went with the easy way to do that. 🙂 Within the custom post type any content will show as notes. The main reading page has a little “View notes” link that is added automatically once you add content. It means I’ll slowly build up a public, searchable set of notes from my reading.

For displaying books I put together a few templates as a child theme. It’s what I use on this site and the child theme is up on Github. I need to clean up the author archive templates a bit but it at least gets a basic layout done.

In the future I’d love to add a graph at the top of the page which plots monthly stats of my reading. Having a visual representation of my reading velocity would be neat to see over time.

Making the WordPress fullscreen editor the default

A couple weeks ago Patrick Rhone mentioned that:

It is kind of sad that, in 2012, I have yet to see a blogging engine with a post editor designed for doing the very thing we online writers go there to do… Write.

Shawn Blanc mentioned that WordPress has a built in fullscreen editor that is pretty minimal. He’s right, the fullscreen editor is one of my favorite additions from the past couple years. The new media improvements are even better.

I decided to take a crack at making a plugin to automatically enable the fullscreen editor. Turns out it was actually pretty easy to do. 6 lines of PHP and 3 lines of JavaScript later the plugin is live. I tested it in WordPress 3.5 with a few other things installed but the testing was by no means extensive. If you find any bugs feel free to open an issue on GitHub.

The code is hosted over on GitHub in case you want to give the plugin a spin. I’m positive the plugin isn’t for everyone, that’s fine. 🙂

How to set post slugs from within WordPress’ iOS apps. Nifty guide on using a plugin to customize post slugs on a WordPress blog. Just a simple shortcode inside of a post.

Jetpack

Jetpack is our latest creation at Automattic. It’s a plugin that brings the best of the WordPress.com experience to WordPress.org installations. It already includes some really slick features that are only going to get better.

I’ve been beta testing this for a few weeks and am super excited to see it going live.  Go read more about it in the announcement post.

New BuddyPress plugin: BuddyPress Docs. This looks like a really cool plugin from Boone Gorges. It’s a front-end document editor for BuddyPress sites. Check out the feature list as well.

Status

WordPress plugins with no configuration settings make me really happy. Hooray for decisions.

Heavy Analytics for BuddyPress. Pretty cool looking plugin in development to display detailed stats about users in a WordPress multi-site installation. Hat tip to Stephane Daury.

WordPress link blog plugin

On Kommons Ryan Sholin asked me how I created a link blog option on one of my old themes for this site. Ryan was looking for a way to redirect post permalinks to a specific URL like the Daring Fireball linked list.

I whipped up a quick WordPress plugin, unimaginatively called WP Linkblog, that will do just that. It looks for a custom field titled linkblog_url and if that exists filters the permalink to redirect to that URL.

By default the plugin filters both RSS items and the_permalink in the theme. To remove the redirection on your site just remove add_filter('post_link', 'wplinkblog_permalink')

Find the whole thing over on Github. Enjoy Ryan!

WordPress TextMate Bundle

This WordPress TextMate bundle looks wonderful. Check out the feature list for everything it will add to TextMate.

Edit Flow v0.6 is in the wild

Edit Flow v0.6 hit the plugin directory today. There are a lot of improvements in it. We’ve added features like custom editorial metadata and a new story budget view. Was a lot of fun to work on and Daniel, Scott, and Mo deserve props for their hard work.