Part 5… Man, my fingers are tired. This is a lot of typing, thank God I don’t write code anymore!

Writing Code

Oh wait… Maybe I do it now and again! This part of my wordpress series is all about writing code and some cool plug-ins. There are two major pieces that I’ll go over here.

1. Widgetizing an existing plug-in
2. My favorite wordpress plug-ins

After those two topics, I’m sure my fingers will be spent for the day so I’ll go into the creation of my own plug-in in part six – (is this ever going to end?)

Widgetizing an existing plug-in

Widgets are cool! Unfortunately not every plug-in has been setup to be a widget. The thing about widgets that I like so much are that they give you lots of flexibility with the items in your sidebar. If you’re working on a new site and have yet to decide what the sidebar order should be, the widgets make it simple to move things around and get things just right. Granted, moving function calls around in php is pretty simple as well!

Okay, so off to the widgetizing world. If you want to make it really, really easy – go download this tool. If you want to go and do it the long way and actually create a widget, I’m going to help my tired fingers out and send you to some really good tutorials / resources – so here they are:

1. Wordpress Widgets – Automattic
2. Simple widgets – from wpbits
3. How to Create Wordpress Widgets – from lonewolf
4. Wordpress Widgets Codex

Why didn’t I write my own tutorial? Simple, these ones are really good! Personally, I used the files from Automattic, pulled up the Google example and started to hack away. The rest of the resources I found while I was hacking around after building the site.

My favorite plug-ins

Okay, so here are the plug-ins that I think totally rock!

• Adsense-Deluxe
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Inline Tag Thing
• SEO Title Tag
• Tag Managing Thing
• Tag Suggest Thing
• Tiger Style Administration
• WP-DBManager
• WPG2
• InlineStockQuote
• StockQuoteSB

Okay, now that I’ve listed them all down lets run through why I love em…

Adsense-Deluxe

This is just a really cool plug-in. You can configure your adsense ad units in the config pane and then reference them in the theme or directly in an article. Pretty nice if you have adsense running on your blog.

Google XML Sitemaps

If you don’t know about Google Sitemaps you need to do a bit of research. Once you’ve gotten with the times and have decided that they are important for your site and search rankings, then download this plugin to have them created automatically!

Inline Tag, Tag Managing, and Tag Suggest Things

These are awesome. The ultimate tag warrior looked like a phenominal plug-in prior to native tag support in wordpress. Now these three plug-ins provide all of the extra tag management that you could ask for!

SEO Title Tag

Title tags are very important. Download this now.

Tiger Style Administration

I’ll admit it, I’m very picky about the way my tools look. This plug-in fixes the hideous default wordpress admin style. It has a few quirks, but it’s much nicer than the regular style.

WP-DBManager

Backup, backup, backup… I can’t say it enough. You must have backups. This will take care of it for you.

WPG2

I wrote a whole post about this thing… it is quite possibly the reason that I switched to wordpress.

InlineStockQuote

I wrote it! I better like it!

StockquoteSB

This is a pretty cool tool. I tweaked it quite a bit for my site. The original is nice and does everything you would need.

So there you have it. Links to some great widgetizing resources, and my list of favorite plug-ins. Next time I’ll talk about the creation of my plug-in the InlineStockQuote.

I’ve spent the last ten plus years of my life writing code for the web. I started with the Microsoft set of tools, ASP and Access. Oh those were the days… well maybe not! I can still remember being in high school spending hours down in the basement working on website after website; writing horrible spaghetti code that was impossible to maintain. After a while I moved along into the ranks of a “professional developer”, starting out again with the Microsoft set of tools and after a few years there I again migrated to the world of Java.

For the last five or six yeas I’ve been maintaining a bunch of websites written in a bunch of different languages and its been driving me nuts! So, a while back I started looking for a better way to build sites, something that will let me focus on getting a functional website created in a short amount of time that will also allow my customers (and me) ease of maintenance. Well, I’ve found it!

This site was recreated in about a day’s worth of time from a home grown “pile of ASP and SQL Server code” to textpattern; and I couldn’t be happier. Textpattern is a great tool, it’s a bit confusing when you start, but once you get the hang of it, it’s awesome! I’ve already re-built a couple of client websites using textpattern and have been working on doing more and more as the days go by.

How can you beat it, its open source, well maintained, extensible and quite simple to use once you figure it out. Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m no php guru, but after spending a couple of days playing with textpattern, I’m already in hacking and tweaking plugin’s all over the place. The tool is flexible, performs really well, and so far the administrative functions have been nothing but helpful for my clients.

I’ll spend a little bit of time over the next few weeks posting some of the code used to build this site; as well as some snippets from a few others. I’ll also spend some time writing about the different aspects of the tool as I understand them… Hopefully all of this information will be helpful to others that are working on moving to this awesome tool! But until then, its back to my next textpattern project; a complete rebuild for my church’s website. It will be XHMTL and fully CSS compliant, and built in textpattern. I’m excited, its going to look great, work great and be much easier for the staff to update on a consistent basis! What are you waiting for, check out textpattern for yourself!