Font Burner Control Panel Plugin
I am proud to announce the release of my first WordPress plugin. The plugin is called Font Burner Control Panel and it allows you to easily add any of the 1000+ fonts from Font Burner to your site. The thing that is exciting to me is that this plugin lets you control the color and size of your headlines in addition to just choosing the font. That was the “missing link” of Font Burner since you used to be limited to black, white, and gray and the default sizes.
Visit the plugins homepage at <a href=”http://www.fontburner.com/the-font-burner-wordpress-plugin/”>FontBurner.com</a> or download it from the plugin directory at WordPress.org. If you use the plugin please give me any feedback that you have. Being my first plugin I know it can be improved and could use all the help I can get.
Since this was my first plugin, I wanted to take a few lines to describe the process. The rest of this post is pretty technical, so feel free to skip it unless you are interested in plugin development…
I have been tinkering with WordPress for a few years now and building a plugin was the obvious next step in my development. PHP isn’t my native language, but the more I hack around in WordPress the easier it is too understand how it works. The best teacher for me is always trial-and-error. If you are interested in creating a plugin of your own, my advice would be to find a plugin that already exists that does something remotely similar to what you are looking to create. Dissect the plugin and try to figure out what it does and how. Change the variables and try to change that plugin to do something else. If you are lucky, you might just end up with the plugin you were trying to create. The thing that I found the most helpful was a “themes option framework” from Jeremy Clark. Once I got theme options page doing what I needed it to do it wasn’t too hard to convert it into a plugin.
Once I had my plugin created, the next thing I needed to tackle was getting the plugin posted in the WordPress directory. WordPress plugins need to loaded into their system using subversion. I haven’t had good experiences with subversion, so I wasn’t sure how easy this would be. The first step is to request to have your plugin added. I made my request on a Friday evening and had approval on Sunday evening. Not too bad, but while I was waiting for approval I read some horror stories of this taking a week or more.
Once I was approved it was time to tackle subversion. I wanted to avoid the command line, so I started looking for a Mac application that would make subversion easier. I found two programs that did the trick. One was Versions and the other was svnx. While neither program made the process completely painless, I think Versions was slightly better. Luckily, I found a pretty good tutorial that explains step-by-step how to add a plugin to the WordPress repository using subversion. If you are braver than me, WordPress has a pretty good overview of how to do it all through the command line.
With my first plugin behind me I am already about finished with number two. The next one is iPhone related and might go live later this week. Stay tuned!
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