Better Plugin Recommendations for WordPress
Nick Hamze, a collaborator and friend goes into detail about why the WordPress plugin ecosystem needs some proper curation. I couldn’t agree more, the new user experience for WordPress users, in this regard is just not that great. That’s why I was eager to work with Nick on building out a very simple plugin + API to power a better “Recommended” tab for the plugins page in your wp-admin.
The current API is pretty simple and simply pulls a curated list of plugins (literally powered by a text file) and fetches data for those plugins using the WordPress.org plugins API (which was probably the hardest part of this project, as it’s very poorly and sometimes inaccurately documented — perhaps I should blog about the pieces I was able to figure out on my own). However, if the idea is well received in the community, I’d love to expand on it further and include some plugins from outside the WordPress.org plugin repository in our recommendations, as I think there’s some great third-party plugins that new users should definitely know about.
If you work for a WordPress hosting company, Nick’s inviting you to get in touch and discuss adding the plugin to your customer’s installations. Both the plugin and the small API server that powers the recommendations are fully open source as well, so feel free to fork them to create your own set of recommendations.
Read more about this on Nick’s Secret Pizza Party blog post
Let me know if you have any thoughts in the comments 💭👇
P2 Hovercards
I absolutely love that at Automattic, we built in-house plugins that we then share with the world.
This handy little plugin is a huge speed-booster and convenience if you use P2 as your project manager (which you should!)
We’ve released a new plugin for the P2 theme that we’re calling P2 Hovercards. Hovercards are like extra bits of information about particular links that show up when you hover the corresponding inline link or object (for example, check out our Gravatar Hovercards).
With this plugin you can add hovercards to your self-hosted P2 sites. A good example of this is core trac tickets. If you look at the Make WordPress Core blog, you’ll notice that tagged Core Trac tickets are automatically linked up. So, something like #12345 links to http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12345.
With P2 Hovercards, we took this a step further. I can set it so that #12345 links to the right place, but then also show some additional information when you hover over the link. The following image is an example of what a hovercard could look like for that ticket:
You’ll notice that it gives all…
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Log Deprecated Notices Extender
If you’re a WordPress developer, then there’s a few developer tools you should have under your belt. One of those is the Log Deprecated Noticed plugin by Andrew Nacin. If you don’t know about it, it’s a plugin you run on your development environment (you have one of those, right?) as opposed to the production environment. From the plugin’s description:
This plugin logs the usage of deprecated files, functions, and function arguments. It identifies where the deprecated functionality is being used and offers the alternative if available.
One of the great features of the plugin is that it shows you how many (if any) new notices/log entries you have, allowing you to quickly see if you’ve used a deprecated function. It does so by adding a little badge (a la updates) right next to it’s menu (which is under Tools). However, since WordPress 3.3 and the fly-out menus, the badge is no longer persistent since the Tools menu isn’t going to be open very frequently, as shown here:
To solve this, I set out to write a plugin that extends the Log Deprecates Notices plugin and adds a link and counter to the new improved toolbar in WordPress 3.3+, like so:
The plugin is available on github and the WordPress.org repository.
Eventually, I’d also like to add the following features to the plugin:
- Update the counter with some kind of callback, so that if a call to deprecated function is made after the toolbar loads, it still counts the new notice.
- Add deprecated log info to the Debug Bar plugin
Any questions, comments, recommendations, let me know!
Joey Kudish 