Wrote my first WordPress Plugin

Chester — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:00:00 +0000

I spent part of this week learning how to write WordPress plugins, and am proud to say that I have completed my first one. It is for ImageKind, a photo printing service that you can use to offer your photos for sale to the public. I learned about it from a friend who had it associated to their flickr account. I thought for sure that there would be a plugin or 30 for it, but I was wrong. There was only one, and I couldn’t get it to work right with this site for some reason. So I decided it was time to learn how to do this on my own.

I hacked away at it quite a bit, trying different tutorials and such. I am not good with object code, so I abandoned that effort and went for something simpler. Once I did that, things started falling in to place. But then I ran up against the same issue I had with the one plugin that had already been done. I decided that the problem must lie with the Magpie RSS Parser that WordPress uses. Indeed, I thought I had found a solution to the problem. I installed his fix, but to no avail. After that, I thought more about his post and decided I wasn’t so invested that I couldn’t try SimplePie instead. Once I had that installed, everything fell into place and the result is now available for download. If you want to see what the output looks like, go to my Prints For Sale section. All in all I am pretty happy with myself for this. It certainly feels like I have accomplished something. And the knowledge I gained in building this will help me with some other content things I was thinking about for my day job.

Enjoy!

Colorado Photography by Chester Bullock » for sale

Wrote my first WordPress Plugin