After the success of Plugin Week, I have decided to do it once again. So, without further ado, Welcome to Plugin Week 2. If you don’t know what a plugin week is, its a week when I publish one plugin per day – for an entire week.

There is one big difference between Plugin Week 1 and Plugin Week 2. In Plugin Week 1, only wordpress plugins where release(they are Eventr, Autofields, Pollin, Surveys, Quartz and Quizzin). This time around, I will not restrict myself to WordPress plugins – I’m going for other software too – expect Drupal plugins, jQuery plugins and more.

I’ll start off with a very simple plugin…

Weather Man WordPress Plugin

Weather Man shows the weather as a widget in the sidebar. You can add the widget using the Widget page under Appearance. Or you can add it in a post using the [weather-man] shortcode anywhere in the post. It uses Yahoo’s Weather API.

Download Plugin

Demo of Weather Man WordPress Plugin

Installation

• Download the zipped file.
• Extract and upload the contents of the folder to /wp-contents/plugins/ folder
• Go to the Plugin management page of WordPress admin section and enable the ‘Weather Man’ plugin
• Go to the Widget configuration(under Appearance) and add the Weather Man Widget into any sidebar.
• Alternatively, you can add the [weather-man] tag in any post and the Weather Man Widget will show up there.

Screenshots

Feedback

If you have any suggestions or notice any problems with the plugin, post it in the Weather Man Plugin forum.

About Me and Plugin Week

If you are new to this blog(I hope to get many new visitors due to the Plugin Week), I’m Binny. I’m a freelance web developer on the LAMP platform. I specialize in PHP and JavaScript. More about me on my personal site. Plugin Week 2 is an initiative to force myself to a small deadline to write code. It worked great during Plugin Week 1 – so I’m doing it again. Also, I get a lot of visitors during the Plugin Week – that can’t be bad.

If you want to get news about the upcoming plugin releases(remember, 1 per day), please subscribe to this site.

If you like the concept of the Plugin Week or if you found it helpful, consider writing a post about Plugin Week on your blog. If you write a post, please let me know – and I’ll list your post on the last day of the plugin week(it will have a ‘Thank You for your Support’ section).

Next plugin will be released tomorrow.

A list of the popular posts of the blog is a standard feature in many blogs. There are quite a few plugins that offer this feature…

• Top 10 – A Page Counter and Popular Posts plugin for WordPress
• Popularity Contest Plugin (beta)
• WordPress Popular Posts
• MostWanted – a Popular Posts Plugin for WordPress

Now, lets see how to do it without using a plugin. In case you are new to this blog, I am currently working on the Plugin Killer Series – a series of post in which I explain how to duplicate the functionality provided by some wordpress plugins – without having to install the plugin.

These plugins work by adding a view counter for each post – whenever a user visits a page, it will increment the count for that page by one. Unfortunately, WordPress does not provide this feature. But there is another indicator for the popularity of a post – its comment count.

The Code

Getting Comment Count – SQL

So the first step is to get the list of post with the most comments. To get that, we can use the following SQL statement…

SELECT id,post_title FROM wp_posts ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0,10

Listing The Data – PHP/SQL

This query will return just 10 posts. If you want more(or less) post, just change the number after LIMIT accordingly. The PHP code for executing the query and getting its result is…

$popular_posts = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT id,post_title FROM {$wpdb->prefix}posts ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0,10");
foreach($popular_posts as $post) {
	// Do something with the $post variable
}

Final Output as Links in a List – HTML/PHP/SQL

Next step is to get the URL of each post. The recommended way of doing this is by using the ‘get_permalink‘ function. Another thing we have to do is to map the result as an HTML list…

<li><h3>Popular Posts</h3>
<ul class="bullets">
<?php
$popular_posts = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT id,post_title FROM {$wpdb->prefix}posts ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0,10");
foreach($popular_posts as $post) {
	print "<li><a href='". get_permalink($post->id) ."'>".$post->post_title."</a></li>\n";
}
?>
</ul>
</li>

Note: The HTML part of the code may need to be changed – depending on your theme.

Add this code to the sidebar.php file in your theme – and you are done!

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’…

• Binny Releases 6 WordPress Plugins In A Week
• Plugin Week, from Binny
• A Plugin A Day!
• Plugin Week promises a daily WordPress plugin for a week
• Plugin Age
• A WordPress Plugin A Day
• Plugin Week – one WordPress plugin a day for a week
• Plugin Week! Binny is on plugin development rampage

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.

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 field are filled. If not, it will ask you to confirm before publishing the post.

If you are new to this blog, this is the Plugin Week. I am going to release one wordpress plugin each day, every day for one week(ie. Monday to Friday). Each day you will get a new plugin by me. This is the second plugin in this series. The first one was Eventr Plugin

Installation

• Download the zipped file from WordPress Plugin Repository page for Autofields.
• Extract and upload the contents of the folder to /wp-contents/plugins/ folder
• Go to the Plugin management page of WordPress admin section and enable the Autofields plugin

Screenshot

Feedback

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

Next plugin will be released tomorrow.