It is time for another WordPress Plugin Competition. Plugin competitions of the past have seen fantastic code, extremely useful and fun plugins and have generated a lot of interest in WordPress and plugin development. Prizes have been very generously donated by readers and well wishers and we already have some donations towards this year’s competition and are looking for more. The final list of prizes will be determined very soon. If you would like to sponsor a prize or donate some money to the competition, please contact me. Lots of eyes see these competitions and your encouragement goes a long way in helping provide incentives. The plugin competition will begin on the 10th of May and will last till the 10th of July.
There will be prizes for first, second and third places and a consolation prize. The plugins should be officially submitted through email and the Plugin Competition Blog (which will be cleaned for the new competition) should be used as a launching ground for plugin ideas, updates, development news etc. The plugins will be judged by a panel of at least three judges and reader feedback will be an essential part of the judging process. At the end of the contest, we will put up posts for each submission and will open them up to our readers for two weeks. The contest results should be declared by the beginning of August.
All code must be GPL (or compatible) and should be available for download through the Competition Blog and preferably through WordPress Extend. The plugins can be modified and tweaked till the last day of the competition or until the author sends us an email with the final version of the code. In essence, the Plugin Competition Blog is the preferred vehicle of communication for all contestants.
Some relevant details:
- Running time for competition = 2 months starting the 10th of May till the 10th of July.
- True WordPress plugins only. No manual modifications can be required of users.
- You cannot submit plugins that have been released already. New code only please.
- Plugins can only be submitted via email. We will make that email address public later on in the competition.
- Plugins cannot have opt-out links back to the authors’ pages (from the main blog pages, admin pages are fine). If you have links or donation forms, please make them opt-in.
- All plugins require documentation as in the WordPress Extend pages. Documentation will be one of the judging criteria.
- Preliminary support for the plugin has to be provided to the public.
- We are looking for innovation, documentation and elegant code.
- Any and all prizes/controversies/issues will be judged and decided at our sole discretion.
More details to be added with time.
Stay tuned and please help spread the word.
Yay! 🙂 I can’t wait to see what plugins this competition can come up with!
Always nice initiative with competitions like this 🙂
Just sent you an email about the prizes. Hopefully this contest will bring out some decent plugin that I can use on my own blog 🙂
Due to the increasing diffusion of WP out of the english community I think one of the requirement for a plugin that have to be considered in judging a plugin would be the I18N of the plugin. The translators community feels the need to have more and more usefull and powerfull plugin being I18N so we could make them localized for our nations, making them more usable by our audience.
Just my 2 cents
Great news, thank you 🙂
Does rewriting a plugins that was built for 2.1 and promptly died when 2.2 was released count as a new plugin?
Aaron: Unless it is a complete rewrite, it will not be eligible.
“Contact Me” page is coming up blank.
Michael Lee: It works for me. Have you tried refreshing the page?
This sounds like fun. I can’t wait to see what people come up with. If anybody needs ideas, I have a ton.
contact me page is blank for me too & yes i tried to refresh 😉
GPL is required? That seems a bit stupid, to be honest. What about less restrictive licenses? At least then we can get away from the virus-like nature of GPL.
Pete: Added compatible GPL licenses to the requirements (which I had intended to do in the first place). However, the GPL issue is for discussion at another place and for another time. As far as this competition is concerned, we will only allow GPL or compatible licenses.
Thanks for the kick in the pants to write a plugin that I have had bouncing around in my head for several months.
How many different plugins can an author enter in the competition?
The competition blog has a bunch of broken images…O_O
Louis: As many as an author can write.
Tried refreshing, tried multiple browsers, tried different computers at different locations. All blank.
Michael: That is truly very strange. I will see what I can unearth. In the meantime, sent you an email so that you have my contact information.
If anyone’s taking suggestions, here’s some plugins I’d like to see:
– plugin that lets you change how the media library names auto-generated thumbnails (for instance, instead of appending the width by height pixels, use suffixes of -med and -sm)
– plugin for managing picture captions. It would create an additional text field ‘caption’ that differs from alt and title – the user types in the caption and the plugin writes the xhtml/css compliant code to insert the image with a the caption text centered below it)
The contact link at the top of the page works fine. It’s the “contact me” link in your post that is the problem Mark.
Len: Bingo! Found it, fixed it!
Here are a couple of ideas for plugins devs:
1. Take advantage of, and repurpose, the new flash uploader feature. I’d like to see a place to actually manage all your uploads, similar to the Organizer plugin that actually uses the new flash uploader plugin to handle the uploads section.
2. A 2.5+ compatible plugin that allows the page management screen to save room by making sub-pages, and sub-sub-pages collapsed under the top level pages. It’d really help move WordPress toward a CMS style “page management” feature. When you click the + sign next to a top-level page, it uncollapses and shows the sub-pages.
3. Anything that extends the custom field features. If you’d like ideas for this one, contact me and I’d be happy to give some details.
@Ronald, I’m always up for hearing plugin ideas – shoot me an email at sales /at\ emailappeal /dot/ com
I’d like to see a plugin which makes a widget (so you could place it in a sidebar) where visitors to your site could click a button/link and add the page/post they’re on to their local favourites for the site. The widget would display their previous local favourites, and they’d be able to delete items from their list. Clicking on items from their list would take them to that page (of course). The link text would be the page/post title, not the HTML title. These prefs could simply be saved to a cookie on the visitor’s computer. Another option would require that the user had to be logged in and you could add the list to the DB somehow. This would give you another insight into what your visitors really want. For a javascript and cookie example of what I’m talking about, see StorDocs. Why would you want this? For a game site, having people be able to quickly go directly to their favourite game would be an amazing feature! People would also find this feature useful on reference and “how to” web sites. I’ve looked high and low, so if this plugin already exists, I apologise in advance. Cheers and thanks!
WordPress just keeps getting better.
Thanks for throwing a contest like this. I can’t wait to see the innovation and creativity our community puts out.
How does the “no manual modifications” rule relate to plugins requiring the user to enter the plugin function into their theme?
John: This has been brought up before and this is how I have answered it in the past.
Can I request two plugins? I’d love a plugin that allows me to go into edit mode on a widget from my front page. Similar to how you can click on “edit” on a post and go into the admin edit page right away. I’d love that for widgets.
Secondly, I want a list of my latest posts back on the dashboard. I liked having the list of 6-7 posts because it reminded me of what I just talked about. Now I have to click into “manage” and “posts” to see the list. I want the list back on the admin page.
So get crackin’ all you awesome plug-in writers!!!
@Mark – You said core file modifications in your explanation to John, but didn’t address template tags or widgets. Both require “manual” changes by the user, but don’t require changes to the core WP files. Are template tags and widgets okay?
Jason: Widgets are fine because they do not require file modifications, but template tags that need to be added to a theme are not ok.
Awesome timing, that gives me enough time after my exams to get creative and submit a plugin!
Are we ever going to see a theme competition again? Maybe I’ll get on to that, haven’t seen one in a while!
Wow!!! This will be really fun…I will surely participate in it.
Will start fishing for ideas now, thanks for the timely announcement.
I am sure that the competition and the results will be awesome.
I have an Idea but not the ability to do the plugin. So, here’s my idea if some of the developer is in need 🙂
To use wordpress as CMS, we use custom page templates but the templates are not editable from wordpress page editor and also the custom page templates can not be used multiple times.
also one more problem is, the wordpress editor do not allow xhtml codes in code view mode, converting it into P tag.
If we can solve this, it would be amazing..
There was a plugin called ‘Custom Write Panel’ that was developed for earlier versions of WordPress that literally allows you to create custom write panels using custom fields. Unfortunately development ceased, but it is now included in a brand new plugin (that I just found out about last week) called ‘Fresh Post’ which I believe might well be WP 2.5-compatible.
@Mark – Another question: Can the plugin include it’s own set of editable templates if it creates other page types not in the core? I’m thinking of a plugin that would necessitate a few more theme files than the typical install, but it would be able to ship with default files, and not require any edits unless you wanted to customize them.
IE – A typical user could activate it and everything would work with no editing, but more advanced users (or designers) could edit the extra theme files if they wanted to.
Jason: That is an edge case. Please send me an email with the exact implementation and the features of each typw and I can make a determination for you.
Wonderful! I will be watching and seeing what new ideas people come up with. This is what makes WordPress “a state-of-the-art publishing platform”.
@Mark – Sounds good. Give me a week or so to get my ideas completely together, and I’ll email them to you to check out. Thanks for agreeing to consider it
I would love to see a plugin that would IM you when a comment from a particular poster left a comment. This way if I had a comment come in from somebody that I really wanted to her from, I could know about it via my cell phone. Too weird? Well it’s a thought anyway 🙂
This is a good chance for WP plugin develop show their great skill, and also for me, i can’t wait to see and test out new plugin. 🙂
any developers looking for plugin ideas? I’m dying for a better version of the yahoo media player for my mp3 blog. I know a lot of other blogs that use it too, since it jumps from song to song, but it would be nice to skin the player and add some options. just throwing that out there
Great contest!
How about a good private posting plugin that covers posts, pages, comments RSS feeds, etc? There are a few out there that just aren’t complete solutions. I want to share some things with friends and family that are hidden from public view.
Can some please make a plugin the incorporates the Highslide JavaScript Thumbnail Viewer with wordpress 2.5. This is without a doubt the greatest best image handler out there.
Thanks
I have a plugin idea I would to suggest.
All post and pages are assigned either categories and tags.
I suggest that this be extended to comments as well.
For example, my most commented post has over 400 comments. They range from reviews to bug notices.
A new reader would be completely over-whelmed if they tried to read all the comments. They may only be interested in seeing the review comments.
I propose a user-defined set of tags for comments on a blog.
In my case they would be something like “Reviews”, “General Comments” and “Questions & Answers”.
A reader would be able to click a comment tag and view only those comments tagged with that tag for that post.
A commenter would be required to enter one, and only one tag.
I’ll explain in more detail if anybody has any questions.
Thanks for reading.
@PlanetPhillip – Great idea! I’ll add that to the comments plugin I’m already developing for the competition!
Thanks to those wordpress users who write thier idea here.
you gave me great idea to work on it.
if anyone have an idea for plugin he can send it to me.
me (at) swanderer.ws
*_^