WordPress Plugins – Developer’s Dream

But, there is no time to dream. Not even time to hack together a pretty picture to decorate this article. I’m fired up for developing, but there is just enough time to let you know what the plan is.

When I finally decided on the SCB framework, I sat down to plan how to integrate my menu system, a hack of DashBar, into that structure. It looked like a project that might also suit Pods, as I would need somewhere to store menu item links.

What’s the first thing I notice in SCB? Routines to handle WordPress options and table data. But can’t I just use Pods for that?

Yes, I can!

To cut a long story, I knocked together a fully customizable menu system in record time. It is not finished yet, but I’m so pleased with the results, and ease of development, that I decided to feature how I have developed it over the next few days.

As of today, it is lurking near the foot of the page, with a list based cascading menu that doesn’t quite work (Note to CSS developers – beware inherited settings that you have assumed will not be used elsewhere). It would have been finished a day earlier, but I was trying to adapt a definition list dropdown menu. All was going really well, until I found that it is impossible to make that kind of CSS structure perform the variable width trick.

Variable width is really a must, as the shrewdBar doubles as a login form. So I will get on with re-wrapping the menu in the same way as the DashBar-based version, then I’ll go through the development stages so you can see just how easy it is to get Pods to do most of your development work.

Once that is finished, I will convert my other plugin work-in-progress) to Pods, and also use it for a full-blown web based application that I have had in the pipeline for well over a year. shrewdChat discussion package soon, then The Big One, just as soon as I get shrewdBar & shrewdChat to good, usable stage.

Tags: shrewdBar, shrewdChat, wordpress plugin, wordpress plugins structure, WordPress Pods CMS