Weblog Tools Collection

Please subscribe to our RSS feed for new articles. We report on Wordpress news, themes, plugins, ideas, hacks, quick fixes and everything about blogging, especially about Wordpress. You can also receive updates from this blog via email if you want that method of notification.

If you are looking for a cool plugin to write, I believe that it would be really useful to be able to message inside the Wordpress admin pages. I have multiple authors and I would like to leave them messages which they would see when they log in and be able to leave comments/critiques on drafts and even as a QOTD or an MOTD for all users of the blog.

This idea could be further expanded to share messages within a certain peer group of blogs. If you have my PeerID, you could receive and read internal messages from my blog that were added to your username on my blog. This should be relatively easy to do if login names remain the same across blogs. I imagine that I would log onto my dashboard to see all the messages/comments that people have left for my login on all the blogs that I am a member of. I can see this being very useful in community type blogs and for people that co-author more than one blog.

Anyone think they can execute this?

[EDIT] For other “Developer Wanted” sort of ideas, check out the Developer Wanted Category on the pluginblog.

Everyone does know that the plugin competition is underway …. right?
Shame on me for not mentioning it here, but the Wordpress Plugin and Mod Competition officially started on April 15th and has been gathering steam.
Some good plugins have been submitted and plugin authors have been very responsive! There are a couple of requests for plugins on that blog and people have been visiting the wiki to get more information and to add their names to the list.
If you are a plugin developer, sign up and sign in on PluginBlog to request plugin ideas, beta test requests or to just announce a plugin. Thank you to everyone that is participating and everyone that is helping.
In spite of a good response from developers, we still need more participants and more plugins. There is a lot of money, praise and appreciation to be won! If you know of someone that would be a good participant, feel free to prod them. We would also really appreciate links back to the blog and the wiki from your blog.

In addition to the participation hoopla, we are actively seeking prize donations from the community and sponsorship ads for the blog and the wiki. Prizes can be anything. If you would like to help the Wordpress community and have a couple of books or gift certs lying around, please email us (at mark at wltc dot net) and let us know.

Name your plugin after yourself. If you have a name for it already, add your name to the beginning or the end. This will make your name stand out, make your plugin more recognizable and it will build your reputation for you. This is a suggestion for all plugin developers participating in the Wordpress Plugin Competition and is applicable, in my mind, to almost every other non-mainstream mod/fix/plugin.

I understand that every project and/or program cannot be named after the developer. I doubt that a project like Mozilla could ever (or should ever) be named after a single developer. However, consider the following example. Do you know who Steve Minutillo is? A lot of you might know of him already because of FOF, but I would wager that an even larger number of you have never heard of him. A project like “Feed on Feeds” would work perfectly fine as “Minutillo’s Feed on Feeds” and Minutillo’s name (and his reputation) would be more widely recognized.

Conversely, it will become mighty cumbersome (albeit, annoying) if every plugin developer named every one of their plugins after themselves. Reserve your judgement and make an intelligent decision. If you believe that this is the plugin of all plugins and is going to win the Congressional award for plugin bravery, by all means call it *insert handle here*’s God-Mode plugin for Wordpress. I can only provide examples from my own experiences and I am never sure which release is going to be a hit, but I spend quite a bit of time naming my code and my work. I now wish I had thought of “LaughingLizard’s Narchives” or “Pictorialis LaughingLizardus” before releasing them!

[EDIT] Matt (in the comments) is right. Doing this just might prevent some collaboration between plugin authors. However, it is still something to think about.

To make sure that the Readme file format does not adversely affect any developers and to formalize the format for use in the future to catalog and categorize Wordpress plugins, I have started a Readme.txt Format for Wordpress Plugins wiki page.

Understand that this is the format to be used for every readme.txt that is accompanied with an entry into the Wordpress Plugin Competition. Also, if you make any changes to that format in the wiki, please make sure there is a VERY GOOD reason to do so and please make sure you leave a note with your name and the reason for the edit at the bottom of the page. Any random and uncommented changes will be reversed.