Night Dreaming (by Sudar)

As you may know already (and if you don’t, dude, follow me) I participated in the recent WordPress Plugin competition. The results are out and even though my Plugins were not selected, I received a much more valuable gift. Guess what, a detailed review of all my five Plugins by my favorite WordPress expert and a great inspiration Ozh.

The following are the lessons that I learned from the reviews

• The details that you enter in the Plugin’s page like Plugin Description, screenshot, installation instructions, FAQ, example usage etc, but really help you to get more users for your Plugins
• When you are using PHP 5+ only features, make sure that you have a fall back mechanism and correct warning to users.
• When making calls to API’s it is better to use the built-in WP_Http class instead of CURL or sockets
• Don’t hardcode the Plugin directory or file name, some users may change it, which might break your Plugin.
• Similarly don’t hard code wp-content directory path. Some users might move their wp-content directory to a different path which might again break your Plugin.
• If you need scripts or CSS, to be included, then include them only to the pages that need them and not to all pages.
• If you are creating a table or storing too many options in db, then it is always better to provide an uninstall hook to clean this stuff when the Plugin is delete by the user.

I am guilty of most of them and I am in the process of modifying my Plugins to fix these issues and over a next couple of days you could see updates to most of my Plugins.

It’s always nice to get feedback for your work from someone whom you respect and in that way I am really very happy that I participated. Thanks Ozh for your time and feedback and WTC for sponsoring the competition and wishes for the winners.

As you would have probably known by now, I am participating in the WordPress Plugin competition and have submitted 5 Plugins for it. (Not sure if it is the highest by an individual and also if they have a prize for it 😉 )

The following are the list of Plugins that I have released for the competition, with their description and voting url.

Easy Retweet

Easy ReTweet is a WordPress Plugin, which let’s you add retweet or Tweet this buttons for your WordPress posts, together with the retweet count.

• Plugin Home page
• Voting url

Geo Mark

Geo Mark is a WordPress Plugin which will automatically locate Geo information in your WordPress posts using Yahoo Placemaker and YQL API’s.

• Plugin Home page
• Voting url

Posts By Tag

Posts by Tag WordPress Plugin, provides sidebar widgets which can be used to display posts from a specific set of tags in the sidebar.

• Plugin Home page
• Voting url

WP IRC

Well WP-IRC Plugin can fetch the number of users online in any IRC channel and can be scheduled to auto refresh it every x.minutes.

• Plugin Home page
• Voting url

Tweetbacks Helper

Tweetbacks Helper is a helper Plugin for Tweetbacks Plugin to help it detect more tweets.

• Plugin Home page
• Voting url

So if you have used any of these Plugins and like it, then please do vote for them at the Plugin Competition blog and help me win the competition. 🙂

I am planning to continue develop them and so if you have any feedback/comments or feature requests then do leave a comment in the particular Plugin’s page.

If you are a seasoned (or just a budding) WordPress Plugin author, then here is your chance to show off some of your coding skills. Weblogs Tools Collection is conducting their annual WordPress Plugin Competition.

Dates

The competition began on May 1st and will run till July 31st, a total of three months. You have to develop a new WordPress Plugin and release it in the Plugin Competition blog before the end date.

Prizes

The list of prizes are yet to be released (waiting for sponsors), but there will be a minimum of $1000 for the winner.

Rules

The following are some of the important rules.

• Should be GPL compatible
• Compatible with WordPress 2.7 and above.
• Be secure and use secure coding methods.
• Should be made available through the WordPress Extend pages
• Announced and discussed on the Plugin Competition Blog.
• Preliminary support has to be provided to the public.

So guys, it’s time to sharpen your WordPress skills and all the best for the competition.

PS: I am working on a Plugin (my entry for the competition) and will release it soon. Stay tuned 🙂