Tag Archives: WordPress

Introducing the Simple Badges plugin (alpha)

Speaking of plugin releases, if you’d like you can have a look at the alpha release of Simple Badges, a fun new plugin I’ve been working on recently.

My goal with Simple Badges is to make the process of awarding badges to users on a WordPress website a painless process. See, Achievements is awesome if you’re using BuddyPress; often I’m not. CubePoints is something to look at if you want your users to accrue points that they can then exchange for things. But if all you want it the ability to award graphic badges for various things, display them on a user’s profile, and perhaps show off with a leader board, then Simple Badges could be for you.

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Introducing the Markdown for P2 plugin

I’ve released a quick new plugin this evening called Markdown for P2. Put simply, it allows you to use Markdown formatting in status updates and comment replies from the P2 theme front end.

I’ve been using P2 a lot lately, and have found myself cooking up little tweaks here and there to optimize it for my own uses. As soon as I ran into a situation where I needed to format a list — and started to bust out the HTML formatting within the text field, ugh — I craved Markdown.

To be fair, I haven’t really done much here except for package together what smarter folks have already done. Michel Fortin wrote PHP Markdown with support for WordPress, though the plugin was never added to WordPress.org. Then Adam Backstrom put together the support for the P2 theme in a Github Gist. Really all I did was wrap this into a handy plugin for my own purposes, and added it to WordPress.org so others can use it too.

I’ve also taken advantage of Dustin Curtis’ Markdown logo mark in the plugin header image (shown above).

Note that if you’re interested in Markdown for your non-P2 WordPress site, I’d recommend Markdown on Save by Mark Jaquith. It’s a bit better for that purpose — this plugin is really only best for P2.

That’s it for now. I hope folks find this simple little plugin useful!

I moved my blog to WordPress.com today

I remember hearing Matt Mullenweg speak about starting up a blog at a WordCamp somewhere. Go figure, right? He may have been talking specifically about WordPress.com, or maybe not, but the gist was how fun it is to sit down with a glass of wine and go through WordPress themes to find just the right one for a website.

I didn’t use wine — a nicely brewed coffee was my companion — but I experienced just what he described this morning when I moved my blog from my own hosting environment over to WordPress.com

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Installing ionCube PHP Loader on Bluehost

I’m an avid WordPress user (every site I start up and run, and many of my clients’ sites as well) and when installing a new Plugin this morning I ran into a little problem. After about an hour of fiddling around on various FAQs and forum topics, I was able to deduce a solution. And rather than dust myself off and walk away, I’m posting this so that others might have an easier time than I did.

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On Storing and Sharing Photographs

When I started using WordPress about two years ago, I was interested in the platform specifically for the utility I saw in it. At the time I didn’t have the slightest idea about how to construct a system for managing content. I had begun to play with PHP includes, but that only gave me a slightly more efficient way of handling static information.
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