Fun with plugins

Posted: 28th Oct 2007, in: General. -

Fun with Plugins is a shortcut for producing Wordpress plugins. Answer the wizard questions below then download the template plugin file. Nothing could be simpler.

The most recent version of the tool can be found at http://www.wp-fun.co.uk/wizzards/fun-with-plugins/

You are currently using version 0.2.3

Comments

1

Amit Bhawani (http://www.amitbhawani.com/blog/) commented at 5:43 am, 9th 11 2007:

Excellent tool there, i tried it out for a plugin to be used at http://www.amitbhawani.com/blog/ but its not working out, may be i did some mistake, do you have any plugins made out using this tool?
2

Christine From The Internet (http://www.neato.co.nz) commented at 8:28 am, 9th 11 2007:

I can has readme.txt?

I only have the option to download a plugin file, despite typing all sorts of readme file junk into the wizard.
3

Andrew Rickmann (http://www.arickmann.co.uk) commented at 8:36 am, 9th 11 2007:

Amit, I have a few plugins in development that have started from this but none that are ready to be released.

Once you have generated the plugin you should be able to activate it without any changes and it should start working with some example code. If you had any error messages let me know. If you tried to activate it and it wouldn’t because of a fatal error try opening the php file; i.e. open http://yourtestserver/wp-content/plugins/pluginfile.php directly instead of via Wordpress. The error messages then should let you know what was going wrong.
4

Andrew Rickmann (http://www.arickmann.co.uk) commented at 9:32 am, 9th 11 2007:

Christine, the readme file is planned for the next addition. Right now all the questions asked are necessary for the information at the top of the plugin file.
5

Diana13 (http://www.134u.com/) commented at 11:00 am, 9th 11 2007:

It’s a very interesting tool! I will definitely use it on the future.
I’ve tried it last night and it works for me, but of course, I make a very simple plugin because I was not prepared to make a complicated one.
Thanks for submitting your article to Resource for Bloggers Carnival.
6

Arctic (http://hellobmw.com/) commented at 11:26 am, 9th 11 2007:

Excellent work! Can I produce any type of WordPress plugin that I like to?
7

Andrew Rickmann (http://www.arickmann.co.uk) commented at 11:46 am, 9th 11 2007:

Arctic, I haven’t placed any restrictions on how it can be used. If you find it useful that is enough for me.

Diana13, I’m glad you like it. If you have any suggestions for improvements let me know.
8

Keith (http://www.doubleblackdesign.com) commented at 1:43 pm, 9th 11 2007:

Andrew - I have been working on a project called the Wordpress Plugin Framework (WPF) for the last week or so. This project attempts to simplify and standardize the development of Wordpress plugins by allowing plugins to derive from a base “WPF” class. I think my project would be a great addition to your project. Your file generator would make the WPF even easier to use and my WPF would make your file generator even more powerful.

Let me know if you are interested in this co-development project. You can take a look at my WPF project by following the link below.

http://www.doubleblackdesign.com/2007/11/08/wordpress-plugin-framework-v002-released/

I also have a forum setup on my site for discussion about WPF usage and development. Give me a shout on the forum if you are interested.

http://doubleblackdesign.com/forums/wordpress-plugin-framework/0/
9

Simonne (http://www.alltipsandtricks.com) commented at 1:53 pm, 9th 11 2007:

This is cool.

I have one small comment: after I finished the plugin and I saw the download link, instead of donloading, I pressed Next, and it sent me back to the first screen.
10

Brad (http://chaoticmortal.com/) commented at 3:43 pm, 9th 11 2007:

Hello, Andrew.

Your plugin generator is pure bliss, but I have some things you could do that would make it a LOT better:

1. Design a interface that you can put the code into instead of just giving you the PHP file and leaving you with a bunch of nothingness.

2. Keep some spaces between name, author, version, etc. For example BradVersion: 1.0Name… isn’t really going to help.

Your tool is brilliant, however, so keep up the great work. Also, nice form background…
11

Dag commented at 3:59 pm, 9th 11 2007:

I made a plugin uploaded it and tested it out. Found one problem the widget created will not allow you to move it back down if you no longer want to display it.
12

Andrew Rickmann (http://www.arickmann.co.uk) commented at 4:12 pm, 9th 11 2007:

Simonne, thanks for pointing that out, I had missed that. I will fix it asap. I love the idea of your competition as well, I’m interested to see what you get.

Brad, I’m glad you like it. I will give some thought to your first point. I am quite keen that the plugin should work when downloaded so that any changes that break things after that are easily tracked down.

I haven’t been able to reproduce your second point. Those things should each be on a new line in the plugin and are in every application I open it in. Are you getting everything on one line?
13

BoltClock (http://blog.NOVALISTIC.com) commented at 4:27 pm, 9th 11 2007:

This looks really interesting! I might use this when I bother to make my own plugin.

@Andrew: for your question ‘Are you getting everything on one line?’, it could be possible that your tool is producing Unix-style newlines instead of Windows-style \r\n. Brad is probably using Notepad which doesn’t recognize newlines alone.

Thanks for making this tool
14

Andrew Rickmann (http://www.arickmann.co.uk) commented at 7:04 pm, 9th 11 2007:

BoltClock, Thanks for the suggestion. That was my thought initially as well, but it works fine in Notepad for me. That’s why I’m so stumped really.

Dag, I am not sure why that should be as all the UI stuff is handled by Wordpress, but I will look into it. Thanks.
15

Abhishek Daga (http://www.abhishekspeaks.com/) commented at 7:33 pm, 9th 11 2007:

Awesome tool… Very intelligent way designed it I am happy to use this..
16

Steveo (http://golabs.nl) commented at 10:44 pm, 9th 11 2007:

Wicked!! This will help me saving quite a bit of time setting up the framework when creating a new plugin, thanks!!
17

Zhang (http://zhiqiang.org/blog/) commented at 8:51 am, 10th 11 2007:

It’s very nice. But can you tell me how many steps are there? I’m tied when I get to ten-th step…
18

Andrew Rickmann (http://www.arickmann.co.uk) commented at 9:09 am, 10th 11 2007:

Zhang,

That’s a good point you raise. As it becomes more complex the number of steps increase and I need to include a way to show how many steps there are.
19

Luke (http://www.red-root.com) commented at 10:27 am, 10th 11 2007:

I must say mate that you done a smashin job here, well done. I’ll definitely be using this with my future plugins
20

Expresion-x (http://www.expresion-x.com) commented at 7:56 pm, 10th 11 2007:

Great job! I’m using the generated code for a plugin I’m working on.
Could you add support for multiple widgets? (like text widgets, where you can specify the number of widgets aviable.
Thanks!
21

Kaloyan K. Tsvetkov (http://kaloyan.info/blog/) commented at 7:22 am, 14th 11 2007:

Nice tool. You can add some docBlock comments though instead of the old school comments (”//something…”)
22

Andrew Rickmann (http://www.arickmann.co.uk) commented at 8:00 pm, 15th 11 2007:

Kalyoan, I have added docBlocks to the to do list.

Thanks.
23

bluy brink commented at 8:21 pm, 20th 11 2007:

Great tool. I often need to quickly create a plugin from existing libraries and this will save me tons of time. Thank you very much.

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