It has long been understood by WordPress theme designers that the WordPress leadership has some control issues. These issues come down to their desire to restrain competition from all but a chosen few.

So what brought this up?

Today @andrea_r posted a tweet about 200+ themes that had been removed from the theme viewer. She posted the source of : WordPress.org Pull 200 GPL Themes You should make a point to read Dave’s post.

Why is this so important?

The WordPress blogging platform and it’s success was not just built by the few folks that control it. It has become so popular by the work and equity of those building themes and plugins. Could you just imagine what WordPress would look like without all these great addons?

It would not be nearly successful as is it is today, not by a long shot!

Just a hobby?

Most people that have put their time and energies into developing themes and plugins started as just a way to give back to the software they love and it’s community. But it’s very natural to desire an income from what you enjoy doing.

And why shouldn’t they? Developing themes and plugins while continually working on making changes every few months to insure compatibility with new versions is a lot of work.

So the rules…?

The only way you can a profit from WordPress is by doing custom design work…. Right? Will that change in the near future too?

At some point will WordPress refuse installation on domains of users that use WordPress to blog for profit? You may think this is a rather extreme thought, but then again if those  developers that help make WordPress what it is today are not allowed to make their hobby into a business, is it really that far fetched?

Now I know that WordPress is not stopping them from making their hobby into a business but they are certainly not helping them.

By excluding them from the communities such as the WordPress Theme Library WordPress in my opinion is spitting in the face of the best WordPress contributors.

One last point

Have you noticed that every premium theme on the market has a link proudly proclaiming “Powered By WordPress”.

Maybe we should remove those links? and of course the links in the default blogroll…

Why is this all so important? (part II)

Because when an open source project losses the support of it’s contributors it ether dies or goes commercial.

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So if you need help or just don’t care to learn all the pesky info needed to do it yourself take a look at the services I’m offering. WordPress install, upgrade and fixing WordPress issues.

If you have questions or comments feel free to contact me or leave a comment.

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Download Entrecard Popper

What is it?

It’s a WordPress Plugin that pops your Entrecard up to the top middle of the page when a user comes from a an Entrecard surfing site, other wise it stays where you put it.

How does it work?

1. After you place it in your WordPress plugin folder, activate in you WordPress dashboard.
2. Go to Settings->Entrecard Popper and place your Entrecard Id number into the box and submit it:
   
3. Go to Design->Widgets and drag the Entrecard widget to your sidebar.
   

That’s it!

But David I don’t like it on my sidebar?!?

Okay, that’s cool! Just palce this code in your theme file where you want it:
<?php PopMyCard(); ?>

Download Entrecard Popper

If you have any issues post a comment below.

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I also added the ability to automaticly post to your blog as well. This is an option you can turn off though.

Go ahead an try the new version Twitter Blaster

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I have added the ability to moderate outgoing twitters and have the twitt posted as a post as well. You can also edit the twitt as well. Just go to dashboard->manage->Twitter Blaster.

It’s very simple to use.

1. simply upload Twitter_Blaster.php to your plugin directory.
2. Activate it.
3. Set the option (Twitter usename and password.
4. Insert this code <?php TB_Twitt4me(); ?> into you index.php template file wherever you want. I would suggest right before <?php if (have_posts())….

This is my first WordPress Plugin I have released to, so please let me know what you think of it, or anything you would like added to it.

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<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Author Plug
Plugin URI: http://MyBlogIt.net/plugins
Description: Displays a short bio and image for each author above or below each post.
Version: 0.5
Author: David Span
Author URI: http://davidspan.com/
*/
?>

Plugin Header

What we have just done is add our plugin’s header to the file. This information will be displayed within the plugin page of WordPress. Now save this file to your plugin directory with the name author_plug.php.

Congratulations, you have just created your first working plugin. If you go to your plugin page within your WordPress dashboard you can activate it.

Of course it does nothing at this point you can leave it active as you work on it. With what we are going to be doing it will not harm your WordPress installation.

Other Files

If your plugin requires other files you can include them in the plugin directory as well. Just do not include the header within them. You can also put your plugin in it’s own subdirectory as well. As long as your main plugin file has the plugin header WordPress will find it.

Final Note

Whenever your working with php it’s a good idea to have no white space before your open php tag. Doing so can cause php header errors.

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There are many ways to to plan out your project. I’ll outline a few for you here.

Flow chart:

Using a flow chart program or just drawing one up on a white board is a great way to outline the decision processes your plugin will follow. It’s a great way of building yourself a road map.

StarUML is a nice open source flowchart software.

Outline

This is the method I tend to use. Simply make a short outline of every thing my plugin needs to do. I sometimes expand this to include note cards or post its to add to the out lines.

This is truly just a short list of ways to plot your course (Can 2 be a list?…). There are many more. What do you use to keep track of your projects?

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The top plugin request I get is for an guest blogger header plugin. I had written a little how to using WordPress templates, but a plugin would be much better.

So the plan..

I’m going to build the plugin, documenting it as I go. In fact I plan to do it in more steps than necessary so that I will be able to cover just about every topic that you might need to build your own plugin.

If you would like to follow along with me I would suggest that you have some basic knowledge of php. A good place to start would be WWW3Shools Introduction to PHP

You’ll also need a good text edit. I like EditPlus, it’s a good basic html editor. Also PHPEdit is a good IDE editor for php.

It would also be a good idea to install a server on your home system. I use XAMPP Lite and have written a tutorial on running it with virtual host.

I should have the first tutorial up in the next day or so. Make sure you subscribe to the RSS.

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