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WordPress Plugin Week

Binny V A — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 18:24:05 +0000

As my subscribers already know, the week before last was Plugin Week – that’s when I publish one WordPress plugin per day for one week. And I managed to pull it off too – there is a list of all the plugins released on that week…

Eventr Wordpress Plugin: Eventr plugin lets you use your blog as an event management tool. You can create an event – the plugin will let people sign up for the event – it can also show a list of all the attendees. Once the event is done, you can deactivate the event and no more signups will be allowed.
Autofields WordPress Plugin: AutoFields Plugin will auto fill the Excerpt and add an Image custom field based on the data you entered into the contents editor. This plugin will set the first paragraph of the content as the excerpt and take the first image(if there are any) and set it as the ‘Image’ custom field(needed for some themes – like Mimbo – my theme). When you hit the publish button, it will check to make sure that excerpt and Image custom fields are filled. If not, it will ask you to confirm before publishing the post.
Pollin WordPress Plugin: Pollin wordpress plugin will let you add polls to your blog. It can be shown to your visitors who will be able to vote in the poll. You can add the poll in a post by including the HTML comment <!– POLLIN 1 –> in the post. Here 1 is the ID of the poll to be shown.
Surveys WordPress Plugin: The Surveys WordPress plugin lets you add surveys to your blog. You can let the visitors take surveys and see the result from the admin side. The user who take the survey can enter their details at the end of the survey – or leave it as an anonymous result.
Quartz WordPress Plugin: Quartz Plugin lets you show random quotes/tips/links/pictures/something else to visitors. These quotes can be added from the admin side. You can add these one by one – or you can bulk import the stuff from a text file.
Quizzin WordPress Plugin: Quizzin WordPress Plugin lets you add quizzes to your blog. This plugin is designed to be as easy to use as possible. Quizzes, questions and answers can be added from the admin side. This will appear in your post if you add a small HTML comment in your post.

What I Learned

I am helpless without my frameworks

After I releasing a beta version of my plugin, I got some feedback about those. To my great surprise, I found that I was making a lot of novice PHP mistakes – stuff like…

not using escaping/validating user input
not using stripslashes
and more…

Needless to say, it was very embarrassing. In all my other applications, my framework takes care of it automatically. When I am developing outside my framework, I feel like a fish out of water. Now I am slowly adapting to coding without the framework. But it will take more time to get fully used to it.

I still have a lot to learn about WordPress plugin development

I only found out about the deltaSql() function after the plugin week. This is a very useful function if you create a distributable web app(like Nexty). Only problem is that its GPL code – I am not sure if I can use it in my BSD application. Anyway, I found that function when I was trying to release an update to one of the plugins – after the plugin week. There is a lot of stuff I still have to learn about WP plugin development.

Putting strict deadline to write code is not(always) a good thing.

As I said earlier I made a lot of blunders when creating the plugins. One of the main reason was I was too used to my framework. The other reason was the deadline. It forced me to write some code that was not all that great. But then again, the deadline had its advantages too – I would not have written the plugins had I not been forced to do that due to the plugin week. In conclusion, you get quantity – but not quality with deadlines.

Learn a bit of Marketing – even if you are a programmer

I used to scoff at articles like ‘The One Thing Every Software Engineer Should Know [How to market]‘ – but now I understand the rational behind that.

Don’t release plugins just before a new WordPress version is going to be made

I am sure the next wordpress(2.7) will break a few of my plugins. In hindsight, I should have waited until that release was over before doing the plugin week. Because I did the plugin week before the release of WordPress 2.7, I’ll have to do a Plugin Fix Week later – a week when I fix all my plugins for WordPress 2.7 compactability

WordPress suppresses errors by default.

Something to keep in mind if you are developing a plugin – SQL errors are suppressed by default. I sent a lot of time trying to figure out the cause of an error before realizing it was an error in the SQL query. You can turn on SQL errors using the code $wpdb->show_errors();.

Thanks for all your support…

Quite a few people supported my effort by linking to me. This is my way of saying ‘Thank You’…

If I have missed anyone, please add a comment with the link to the post where you talked about plugin week and I’ll add you to the list.

Quizzin WordPress Plugin for Quiz Creation

Binny V A — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:37:29 +0000

Quizzin WordPress Plugin lets you add quizzes to your blog. This plugin is designed to be as easy to use as possible. Quizzes, questions and answers can be added from the admin side. This will appear in your post if you add a small HTML comment in your post.

Welcome to Plugin week – in Plugin week, I release a new WordPress Plugin each day, every day for one week. This is the sixth (and final) plugin in that series. The plugins released so far are…

Note 1: Quzzin is a beta plugin(as are most of the plugins released in the Plugin Week) – so watch out for bugs. And trust me, there will be quite a few.

Installation

Download the zipped file.
Extract and upload the folder to /wp-contents/plugins/ folder
Go to the Plugin management page of WordPress admin section and enable the Quizzin plugin
Go to the Quizzin Management page(Tools > Manage Quiz) to create or edit Quizzes
After creating the quiz, create a new post and add the HTML comment [QUIZZIN 1] in it. Here the ‘1′ should be the ID of the quiz to be inserted.

Usin’ Quizzin Plugin

This plugin is pretty straight forward – after enabling the plugin, go to the Manage Quiz page(Manage > Manage Quiz). All the existing quizzes will be show here. You also have the option of creating a new quiz – or editing an existing one.

Click on the ‘Create new Quiz’ link to create a new quiz – you have to fill in three fields – the quiz name, the description and the Final Screen.

The ‘Final screen’ field is very important – you can customize the result of the quiz using this. Basically, what you fill in here will be shown when a user completes the quiz. You can use several variables here. For example, if you put in the text ‘%%SCORE%%’, it will be replaced by the score the user got in the quiz.

The other possible variables are…

Variable	Value
%%SCORE%%	The number of correct answers
%%TOTAL%%	Total number of questions
%%PERCENTAGE%%	Correct answer percentage
%%GRADE%%	1-10 value. 1 is 10% or less, 2 is 20% or less, and so on.
%%WRONG_ANSWERS%%	Number of answers you got wrong
%%RATING%%	A rating of your performance – it could be ‘Failed’(0-39%), ‘Just Passed’(40%-50%), ‘Satisfactory’, ‘Competent’, ‘Good’, ‘Excellent’ and ‘Unbeatable’(100%)
%%QUIZ_NAME%%	The name of the quiz
%%DESCRIPTION%%	The text entered in the description field.

Once you have filled out this form, you will be taken to the next page where you can manage your questions. Click on the ‘Create new Question’ to add your questions and answers. You have to select one of the answers as the correct one.

After you have added all the question, create a new post and add the HTML comment [QUIZZIN 1] – here the 1 should be the ID of the quiz to be inserted. That’s it – you should have a working quiz on your blog now.

See it in Action

I have created a WordPress Quiz using the Quizzin plugin. Lets see how well you know wordpress. If you take the quiz, post your results in the comments field.

Credits

Thanks to ‘The’ Anand for suggesting the idea of a Quiz plugin. Also, Mani Karthik provided a lot of encouragement to create the plugin.

As a matter of fact, Quizzin is the first plugin in the plugin week series. When those two suggested the Quiz plugin, my lazy brain immediately saw the benefits – I get 3 plugins for the price of one. Once the quiz plugin is created, just remove the correct answer option, limit the question to just one and record the answers – and you have a Poll plugin. To create a survey plugin, just remove the correct answer option and record the user’s input. You also need to create a interface to show the results. Voila – you have a survey plugin. That’s right – the Pollin Plugin and Surveys plugin are based on the Quizzin Plugin.

The eventr plugin was created for the Barcamp Kerala. Again, the credit for its suggestion goes to Anand. After that plugin was ready, I am sitting on four unreleased plugins(that is, two plugins and an idea for two more) – that’s when the thought of doing a plugin week hit me. The rest, as they say, is history.

Feedback

If you have any suggestions or notice any problems with the Quizzin WordPress plugin, post it in the Quizzin forum.

That’s it! Plugin week is over. 6 days, 6 plugins. Now, I have to go catch up on some much needed sleep. Happy Blogging!