WordPress Plugin That Isn’t
February 2nd, 2010 by Keith from shrewdies | Filed under Function.It might become one. It started life as one.
But, for now, it is a Pods package, and this is the first part in a series that explains what a Pods package is, how it improves WordPress functionality, and how you can apply it to your own site.
Before we start, I was reminded earlier about the crucial importance of purpose as your first step. When you set out to add functionality to WordPress, you must be clear about why you are doing it. If you employ assistants, or ask for help on the forums here, or elsewhere, you must communicate that purpose clearly.
Xarzu told me earlier that she wanted to write WordPress plugins and asked if I could recommend a comprehensive list of hooks, actions and filters. I subsequently found she’d asked this in just about every forum on the Internet, irrespective of it’s subject matter. That kind of spam is best ignored, but it does serve as a prime example of what goes wrong when you do not have a clear purpose.
Firstly, I noticed that Xarzu had received lots of positive help, despite the poor question. People want to help, but if the goals are not clear, if the question is too vague, if there is lack of purpose, then that help is often wasted. So before you even think of adding any functionality to WordPress, think long and hard about the purpose of your plugin, and who the typical user is.
My latest project started when I tried the Splix theme, and found the built-in menu bar. It certainly helped me use WordPress as an application, and is a welcome feature of WordPress.com sites. It struck me that as you add functionality to your website, e.g. with forums, polls, news etc, your website becomes an application for your visitors. So I started my WordPress menu bar plugin project.
The purpose of the plugin is to improve navigation efficiency for 3 groups of users:
- Visitors. The vast majority who read your website and leave. You want them to return, so let them find your best content easily. You want them to become contributors, so let them register easily. You want them to feel welcome, so give them help to learn how your site works. The menu bar lets you display all this where it can be found easily.
- Contributors are visitors who add comments or start new discussions. You might run a reference site that doesn’t allow visitor contributions. In that case, ignore this group, but for most websites they are crucial to the growth of your site. The plugin helps by allowing contributors to easily find and edit their own contributions.
- Administrators. As the chief contributor, admins get all the benefits of the other groups, plus easy access to commonly used admin pages. Which pages are commonly used? That’s entirely up to you, as the menubar items are stored in an easy-to-edit Pods database.
All of this raises the efficiency of your site, which is a very shrewd thing to do – that’s why the plugin is called shrewdBar. I will explain the development stages in a series posts over the next few days.
Tags: menu bar, shrewdBar, wordpress plugin, WordPress Pods CMS