plugin – Mike Jolley

The process of building a plugin (a one day challenge)

Mike Jolley on December 30, 2013

Building plugins is fun, especially the smaller ones. Today I thought it would be a good challenge to build one whilst documenting the process; I’m actually writing this post as I plan and build the plugin itself with the hope of having it finished by the end of the day.

What am I building? A small post-series plugin so I can group all of my #WTBFB posts and allow navigation between them on my blog.

Bring on the challenge!

Download Monitor, Legacy Importer & Page Addon officially released

Mike Jolley on June 23, 2013

Today I finally finished up and deployed “version 1” of the Download Monitor plugin. This is more of a re-release than an update, hence the version reset (which should also prevent automatic updates!).

If you want to update from a legacy version of Download Monitor, after installing the new version you’ll need to also install and run the Download Monitor Legacy Importer. This will handle migrating all of your data to the new format.

Showcase your download catalog

I’ve also re-released the page-addon as a separate plugin.

The page addon basically lets you add a [download_page] shortcode which lists all downloads on your site with categories, tags, pagination and searching. It also adds ‘single’ views for your downloads.

Because this used to be part of the main Download Monitor plugin, albeit not as good as it is now, I’ve made this a “Pay what you want” add-on so pay what you feel is fair 🙂

I hope you all find these updates useful!

A New Job Board Plugin for WordPress

Mike Jolley on June 7, 2013

job

I’ve just made a new plugin available (on github) that I’ve been working on to allow you to add and manage job listings on your WP site. It’s name; WP Job Manager.

Features

One of the shortcode options for job display

Allows admin to create job listings
Frontend submission form supporting guests and registered users
Jobs can be set to expire after X days
Ajaxified job listing shortcode with search, filters and pagination
“Overview” shortcode
Widgets for showing jobs in your sidebar
Jobs can be ‘applied’ for via a munged email address or a given URL (revealed on click)
(should) work with any theme given some style love
Manage jobs from admin, including approving jobs if required
Employer dashboard for marking jobs filled or ending listings early
RSS feeds for the currently viewed search

Read on for a more in-depth look at what this baby can do.

The New WordPress Download Monitor Plugin

Mike Jolley on April 20, 2013

A few months back I announced that the Download Monitor plugin was no longer being maintained. Why? Several reasons really:

Dealing with daily support emails caused a massive headache
Some of the code was embarrassing, and the plugin badly needed a rewrite..
..but due to legacy this would have been messy and difficult
The donation model didn’t really work, and .org would’t allow ads inside the plugin to fund development

However, despite all of this, given the popularity of the plugin I decided to secretly start building a new version without the restraints of legacy code dictating the way forward…

Released a small stats plugin for WordPress developers

Mike Jolley on July 30, 2012

Today I released a small (but hopefully handy) plugin called WP Page Load Stats which I created to help benchmark a few other plugins I’m working on.

The plugin works on both admin and on the frontend and displays:

Memory usage , peak and percent
Page load time
Average page load time
The query count

Averages are calculated on each load, and you can reset the average by clicking the reset icon.