Tag: plugins

My second plugin

RB Internal ExampleAs promised I’ve written another wordpress plug-in. I am hoping this plug-in will become a useful tool for bloggers when linking to posts and pages within their sites.

When I came to link to a couple of pages from my {{post id=”extras” text=”Extras”}} page I presumed there would be an easy way to do this. I couldn’t find one anywhere and there didn’t seem to be any plugins either. I took a look at the plugin ideas forum over at wordpress and it seems I wasn’t the only one wanting a simple and flexible way to add internal links to my posts.

For more information and to download the beta version of this plugin visit the {{post id=”rb-internal-links-plugin” text=”plugin page”}}.

Random Blog Article WordPress Plugin

Introducing my first ever word press plug-in: Random Blog Article v1.0 (yay!).

Having set-up wordpress and had a play around I was very impressed by

  1. the usability of the administration panel
  2. how powerful and yet easy to install the plugins were

I did some research in to how wordpress had done this and discovered that making a plug-in myself wouldn’t be too difficult. On a side note, if you are interested in developing a plug-in, definitely start here: Writing a Plugin

On to the plug-in (at last). For more information on what it does, how to download it and how to install it, click {{post id=”random-blog-article-plugin” text=”here”}}.

Put simply it is a replacement for the blogroll only it displays just one random article from each of your favourite blogs and, by default, only one at a time. More than one at a time will have to wait for v1.1 if people take up any interest. At a set interval the current blog and article is replaced with a random new one via AJAX.

Using the admin panel page you can add as many of your favourite blogs to the plug-in as you wish, all cached to keep things speedy.

Random Blog Article PluginRandom Blog Article Plugin Admin Panel

Take a look at the screenshots or just scroll to the top of the page for a preview.

It is in-fact a lot like the “Hot Blog” plug-in I’ve seen on the WordPress Stats dashboard page. I couldn’t find any plug-ins like it, hence writing my own. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were in fact hundreds and I was just looking in the wrong place but at least I can say I tried! 🙂

I’m thinking for my next plug-in, something that will allow me to easily link to other posts and pages within a blog without having to put in the full URL. That way if I ever change my permalink structure (for some strange reason) I don’t have to go back and change all my links. After some research I could only find one other plug-in like it which was Easy Post-To-Post. Please let me know if there is already a better way of doing this and I’ll stop reinventing the wheel.

Testing cat link