I have a great appreciation for wordpress plugin developers. Having released a few simple plugins myself, I understand the time it takes to develop and test a quality plugin. On top of that, devoting time to support the plugin and keep it up-to-date as wordpress rapidly evolves is another effort in itself.

That’s why I appreciate the plugins Joost de Valk has been churning out.

Just recently I setup his Search Suggest plugin on our cake blog. This plugin offers a clever way to mimic some of the useful spelling suggest features offered by major search engines.

This is especially important on our cake blog. Using search meter, we’ve found that many people are searching for cakes using common misspellings. And while we’ve developed a plugin to correct common mispellings, this tactic doesn’t scale well as it requires us to hardcode common misspellings.

Joost’s plugin allows us to cover a wider array of mispellings. A good addition to this plugin would be a feature to allow wordpress admins the ability to add overrides for commonly misspelled words. This would be useful because the Yahoo API doesn’t work as well for word combinations. For example, the API will catch the misspelling for Haloween, but does not catch misspelling for “Haloween Cake“.

I suggest wordpress admins check out Joost’s complete lists of plugins.

After many requests, I’ve finally added new functionality to the PHPList Wordpress Integration plugin. The plugin now supports the ability to display multiple lists on the form. So if you manage multiple lists through PHPList and want to give the user the option of choosing which one to subscribe to, this is now supported the PHPList Wordpress options panel.
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I’m happy that wordpress developers included tagging as a core feature in their latest release. And I also appreciate their philosophy of including just the bare tagging essentials and relying on the plugin developer community to expand on those features.

With that being said, one of the features that is missing from the 2.3 tagging implementation is the ability to search for tags associated with a post. Christine’s UTW did this rather well and I found it was an essential feature for our wedding cake blog. We have several posts that have been tagged with words that don’t necessarily appear in the post - i.e. Wedding cupcake Stands, or Spring Themed wedding cakes

So I created a tag search plugin that will join against the appropriate tables to ensure you tags are searched. My hope is someone will take this search component and wrap it into a complete tag management plugin. (Similar to what Christine has started)

I have two fixes for users who are having trouble getting wordpress search to work correctly with the Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin:
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I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to modify my wordpress category template to display thumbnail images of each cake in a gallery format. Combining this with my highslide plugin provides a simple and easy to maintain gallery.
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I recently upgraded one of our testing sites to WP 2.1 Here are some of the issues and fixes that I went through:
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I’ve added more flexibility to the Wordpress WP-HIGHSLIDE script. The new updates allow you to toggle the caption box, close window link, and next and previous links through global settings in WP-HIGHSLIDE options page.

If you want to override the global settings for a single image you can use one of the override settings in your <highslide>. More info in the FAQ section.

Note: I’m temporarily including the highslide.js script with the plugin. The script writer made an enhancement to highslide that makes it much easier to integrate with wordpress. I’ve included that fix in highslide.js, but it’s not yet available in his latest release 2.2.8. Once that fix makes his latest release, I will no longer include the script.

Looking for an easy way to use Highslide JS thumbnail viewer in your wordpress blog? My new plugin, WP-Highslide allows easy integration of Highslide JS using wordpress quicktags.

For documentation and download go here and for a demo check our wedding cake blog. Let me know if you find this useful.

After a lot of integration work, I was able to create a pretty nifty Ajax enabled wordpress poll for a Valentine’s Day contest we are running at Pink CakeBox. The poll allows the user to vote for their favorite wedding cake and submit their contact information. (more…)

This weekend I worked on a enhancing an existing related post plugin from WASABI. The plugin finds related posts using mySQL full-text search functionality.

Along with each related post, I wanted to display the cake or cookie that the post highlighted. (more…)