A few years ago, my thinking shifted in how WordPress plugins should be developed. Let me explain.

WordPress has evolved into a platform. You can build a site with just a blog or a project management system using the plugin API. The ways WordPress can be extended is the main reason I started using it and developing for it.

When a new feature gets added in WordPress, the core developers take into very careful consideration how both plugin developers and theme authors will want to extend it and then make it very easy to do so. They often add new hooks and filters for features that have already been in place. In short, they want the platform to be extended and make it easy to do so.

Even themes have been moving to a parent/child relationship. Many theme frameworks have been developed that at first glance are very plain. But after looking at code, you can see many hooks and filters added to make creating a child theme so much easier.

As a plugin developer, I think plugins could learn from this.

There are so many plugins for WordPress. Many are available for free download on the WordPress.org plugins site. A lot of these plugins were written by the author for a specific purpose. I think it is great that these people have released their plugins for others to use.

It is safe to say that most of these plugins were not written as a framework. Many of them shouldn’t be. Doing so would make WordPress an even more powerful framework.

Instead of blueprints, we should be providing ways to extend the plugins. We should provide ways to override the options panels. We should provide ways to change the behavior of a plugin. We should keep in mind that while developing plugins for a certain purpose, we can add a few more lines of code and let other developers change the plugin to do what they want.

There are various ways this can be done. Let me give some examples:

• There are so many Twitter clients. How many of these clients have provided actions and hooks for plugin developers to quickly add custom functionality for a client?
• I have used some plugins with many pages of options. Have you ever configured a plugin on a test site and then had to manually copy over the options to the production site? Wouldn’t it be so much easier to provide a way to disable to the options panels and configure in a ‘child’ plugin?

There are many more examples. Can you think of any?

Some plugins are doing a great job of this. Personally, I know I need to revisit some plugins and do better at this. More than anything, it requires a shift in how we are thinking of plugins.

Let’s make plugins frameworks instead of blueprints.

The changes that have been added:

• Threaded Comments
• Post Classes
• Sticky Posts

I also fixed a few minor bugs. Also, if your blog is using 2.7, you will automatically have your comments upgraded to use threaded comments. Otherwise, your blog will continue to have regular comments. I have seen some themes have an option to turn on threaded comments. If this is a wanted feature, I would be happy to add it.

Currently, I am working on a few projects and have been looking at a lot of themes. Not very many themes have added 2.7 support yet. I was surprised. Hopefully, theme developers can find time to add these features so that WordPress users can enjoy the new functionality.

Since then, I have tried to avoid Twitter and thought of some good excuses to do so. I wanted to use it on my own domain to do updates on family life. I can use laconi.ca for that. I didn’t want it to be just another thing I had to use to connect with people. I can barely update my blog. Then it was always offline. Since it has gotten better.

Enough with the excuses. Lately I have been thinking of how I can use Twitter together with the blog. I just have to do it now. I think it will be fun. My profile can be found at twitter.com/joshh.

In the future, I would like to add my feed to this blog. When I get time it will happen.

Still I see big value in getting a service such as laconi.ca working on your own domain. But this is not one of those cases. I am going to take advantage of the large user base on Twitter.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Twitter, here is a quick video on YouTube. Sign up for it and follow me and I’ll follow you.

New User Approve is a WordPress plugin that allows a blog administrator to approve a user before they are able to access and login to the blog. I currently use it on my private blog and it serves it’s purpose wonderfully.

I have created a page on my blog that I will track any progress I make on it. I wanted to release it to the public to find out what everybody thinks and perhaps which new features to add. That and it most likely is not perfect so I would like input on how I can improve it.

I’m going to put it up on the WordPress plugin repository. There are a few things I need to add to make that possible.

Update: No more comments will be allowed. If you are having issues with the New User Approve plugin, please post in the New User Approve forums on WordPress.org.

I have submitted it to the wordpress theme directory. I will let you all know when it does get approved.

I built the theme on top of what I believe is the best theme available for WordPress: Sandbox. But the downside of Sandbox is it’s just a plain template. So I used to add styling to all the template files. That way my theme inherits all of the benefits that the Sandbox theme provides.

Another reason I created my own theme is that I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted out there. Now I have one that I can take to where I think a WordPress theme should be. I have lots of cool ideas that I would like to add to the theme, such as an option panel that will allow an admin to easily change the layout, for example.

The most immediate changes that I will be making to it will be providing 2.7 support.

If you’ve been putting off backing up your data, here’s a good chance. I’ll be glad to help out if you need it. Just leave a comment if you are interested and I’ll send you over a discount code.

I have been using it for about two weeks. I’ve installed it on 3 computers-1 Vista, 1 XP, and a Mac. It was really easy to do on each one. I can access my backed up files from each computer using the Jungle Disk client, through each OSs file browser, or any of the many other methods because it is using Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Solution) web service.

My Backup Requirements

After hearing many stories of people losing data such as images because of a hard drive going bad, I have thought what I would like a backup service to do. It’s inevitable. Your hard drive will go bad. It could be tomorrow. Or in three years. It sucks when it happens.

Everything, at least for me, is going digital. All of my family’s pictures are digital. All of our music is digital. Although in some cases I have physical copies (CDs) I don’t want to spend time to do it again. Soon I will have all of our movies converted as well. It would be horrible to lose this data. Lots of time, money, and memories gone.

A lot of data is being moved to the cloud. I don’t use a word processor any more. If I want to create a document or a spreadsheet, I do it in Google Docs. This is great for some things and bad for other reasons. But I feel very confident that I am not going to lose my data.

In the past, I have had multiple computers or hard drives and have stored backups that way. This saved me a few times. But what if your house were flooded or burnt down without you having the chance to rescue your backup. Personally, I’d be worrying about other things besides my backup in situations like this.

It is absolutely necessary that you have a backup in a different physical location.

What I Like About Jungle Disk

One of the reasons why I chose Jungle Disk is the pricing model. I pay a one-time fee ($20) for the software and then pay for what I use for bandwidth and disk space from Amazon. Free upgrades and pretty cheap

I can install the software on as many computers as I want. It runs on all OSs (at least the ones I use). The software is really easy to use. I specify which files and/or folders to backup. I can create scheduled times to perform the backups. I love the configuration options. You can add encryption. It can be used by my mom (hopefully) but is geeky enough for me.

Another great thing is that you can access your backups through your file browser. In Windows that would be Windows Explorer. If you want to backup a file, just copy it over. Again, this makes it really easy.

Oh ya. You can also restore your data if you need to.

Now I’ll get to the part I really like. It is built using Amazon S3. I can do whatever I want with the data once it is backed up. The possibilities are endless. I’m working on a few side projects to take advantage of this.

What Does JungleDisk Lack?

In a word, nothing. It is a wonderful piece of software. It was made to backup your data and that is what it does a good job at.

I highly recommend this software. I’m fairly confident that you have data that you need backed up. It’s about time you do it.

For those of you that are still reading this blog, I thank you. Please give me feedback on what you would like to hear about in the future.

I’ll be posting some things regarding what I’m doing at work. What’s going on in the industry. Some ideas that I think should happen. Side projects that I’m working on in my spare time. And random thoughts on everything else.

The other day I was cleaning up my email inbox. Last week I heard a wonderful talk while I was working and listening to some podcasts. Merlin Mann gave a great presentation at Google on July 23rd. He called it Inbox Zero. I admit I don’t have a huge email problem but it gets annoying to keep your email organized. He gave some great pointers on what you need to do. The main point I took away from it is to keep you inbox clean at all times. Thus, the cleanup of my email.

I use Gmail as my mail client but have many email addresses going into the same inbox. That has been the best thing about Gmail for me.

While I was cleaning up my inbox, I noticed I had not received a Google Alert email in a while. I subscribe to some alerts to find out when anything is said on the internet on a few topics. After doing some research, I noticed that Gmail (a Google product) was marking the Google Alert emails as spam. I found that quite funny. Now that my alerts are fixed, I can find out once again when somebody says something about me. Did you know that there is a Josh Harrison that is a freshman offensive lineman for San Jose St? I wouldn’t have ever known that without those emails.

If you couldn’t tell, I did the design myself. Now I have more respect for what web designers do. But I tried to make it as easy as possible by using the sandbox wordpress theme to build on top of. I just had to choose a color scheme and modify the style sheet.

I chose my color theme by choosing a base color (the green at the top of the site) and then I went to the Kuler web site that Adobe Labs has created to find and create color schemes. That was a handy tool that I’m sure I’ll be using in the future. Anyway, after picking the base color I could find colors that went well with it using the color science that I know absolutely nothing about.

Currently, I use eclipse as my development environment. That includes web development. I downloaded a trial version of Dreamweaver to use that initially to see if I was missing out on something. Dreamweaver was nice but it is not worth the price for me personally. I’ll continue using eclipse, although there is room for improvement, especially with the web development tools.

Please let me know what you think of the design. Color scheme? Fonts? I know there are a few issues that I need to work out. Let me know if you find any. It is definitely a work in progress, so leave any suggestions if you have any.