Shortcodes in Widgets

Posted on: March 10, 2010 by Chris Coyier

I had occasion the other day to run a shortcode inside of a text widget. You know shortcodes… we talk about them all the time. They are keywords in [square brackets] that do something special. Sometimes something really simple like returning a string (so you can have a global location to change that string) or something complicated like call a plugin that does something fancy like build a photo gallery.

But alas…


This ain’t gonna work “out-of-the-box”

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How to Add Your Plugin to the WordPress Plugin Directory

Posted on: March 8, 2010 by Jeff Starr

Getting your plugins listed in the official WordPress Plugin Directory is considered a chore by many, but it’s nothing that should stop you from sharing your plugin with the community at large. Up until now, I haven’t really bothered with adding my plugin collection to the Directory, but after Herb Goodman helped to package my recent Block Bad Queries plugin, I figured now was a good time to dig in and learn the ropes. It turns out the process only took about an hour to complete, not including the waiting period for access to the Subversion Repository (which was about 18 hours). Definitely worth the potential exposure provided by having your plugin listed in the official directory.

If you are a seasoned plugin developer, you already know how to hook it up at the WordPress Directory, but for those who don’t, this DiW tutorial will show you everything you need to know.

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PubSubHubbub Now On All WordPress.com sites (+ plugin for self hosted sites)

This is me trying to understand it:

Instead of services that read your feeds (e.g. Google Reader) having to ASK for your feed periodically, now they can instead just wait until YOUR SITE notifies THEM. Basically a “push” service.

It seems to me this is half the equation. The other half is building services that accept these push notifications. I’m not sure who is already doing that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is on it, since it seems like a more efficient way of doing things on both sides (less server resources on both sides).

Two concerns I can think of:

  1. Is this just as reliable as the “old” way? People not getting feed updates because of a hiccup in the chain sucks for everyone.
  2. This makes “accidentally” hitting that publish button potentially even more embarrassing than it already can be. Like when you accidentally publish a post instead of a page.

Also check the overview slideshow here.

Add Link to Favorites Dropdown

This is basically a smarter way to handle the situation I just posted about. Using a function to manipulate the favorites dropdown instead of a core hack.

Change Quick Action Button in Admin

Posted on: March 2, 2010 by Chris Coyier

You know the “quick action” button in the WordPress admin? It’s a darn useful little UI touch. At the Dashboard, the default is “New Post”. But depending on where you are in the Admin, the default of it changes. In general it’s really helpful. For example when you are in the Plugins area, the default is Install Plugins:


Default action being smart

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