WordPress GSoC 2009 Idea: Workflow
Birds are chirping, trees are blooming, and each day is a little longer. This can mean only one thing: Google Summer of Code is upon us. This year, I’m proposing to add a publishing workflow to WordPress.
The most popular WordPress actions and filters
WordPress has an amazing plugin system that has allowed thousands of plugins to be created. At the heart of the plugin system are actions and filters that allow developers to hook into the WordPress internals and tweak things. There are hundreds of actions and filters, many of which are described on the codex, and developers can create their own as well. I was curious which ones were most used by plugin developers so I parsed the WordPress plugin database and ended up with the graphs and analysis below.
Walking around at Occoneechee Mountain
With the semester winding down, I took a couple hours this morning to go outside and see the world for a change. My goal was Occoneechee Mountain State Natural Area, a state park about 10 miles away. The drive there along Old Highway 86 was pleasant enough. Until, that is, I got closer and passed under I-40 and I-85. You see, from the park itself, you can hear these interstates because it borders on one of them and the other is only a couple miles away. The interstates largely tainted the pleasantness of being out in the woods.
Consider the lobster
As my time in Würzburg teaching English was winding to an end, I was seeking a longer text that could challenge my advanced class of juniors. We had spent almost a year (two for some of them) reading political articles and random current events, but I wanted to find something literary, something that had some level of merit. I also wanted something that would be interesting and hopefully draw them in.
Use WP-Crontrol to keep track of Akismet
If you’re using Akismet to tackle spam on WordPress, there are a number of statistics available to you about your current spam situation. These are all available in the Comments page of your blog, but who wants to go there every day to check up on things. By taking control of WordPress Cron with WP-Crontrol and a couple lines of code, you can receive this information sent by mail every day.
Plugin Stats 1.1 Released
Last week, I released Version 1.0 (and quickly thereafter, Version 1.1) of a WordPress plugin called Plugin Stats! The plugin is designed for WordPress plugin developers to keep track of downloads of their plugins. The plugin graphs the number of downloads in three different ways:
Using WordPress Cron and WP-Crontrol to make you post more
The new version of WP-Crontrol allows you to add new cron entries with code. This allows you to write code that will repeatedly be executed without actually touching any .PHP files. Below, I present a way to utilize this functionality to remind you to post something if you haven’t done so in the past two days.
Twitterdoodle 1.0 Released
Over the weekend, I quietly released Twitterdoodle, a WordPress plugin which allows a user to create posts and categories based on Twitter keyword searches. It uses Summize to provide search results.
WP-Crontrol 1.0 Released
WP-Crontrol has hit 1.0! The powerful new features in this version allow you to take complete control over what’s happening in the WP-Cron system. Here’s what’s new:
Get your WordPress series in your XML sitemap
If you use the XML Sitemap Generator and Organize Series plugins for WordPress, then this is something you can use to get your series more noticed by Google and other search engines which pay attention to XML Sitemaps. If you take a look in your sitemap (http://example.com/sitemap.xml), you’ll notice that the series that you’ve been working hard to put together are no where to be seen. That’s because you have to let the Sitemap Generator know about them. The code snippet below, perfect for the functions.php file of your theme, will do just that.
