It’s fun to actually get to write and release a WordPress plugin at work! I just finished the initial commit on the MoveOn Campaigns Plugin … a fun little plugin for embedding MoveOn Petitions in your blog or website. A couple takeaways from writing this:
- I was reminded that the use of a plugin code template is well worth it. For a while now I’ve been using Daniel Convissor’s excellent template.
- The WordPress widget API is extremely easy to use. The basic technique is to extend the base widget class, which in most cases really only means implementing 3 functions and a constructor.
- It can be tricky working with widgets with non-tiny minimum widths. Every widget has a de facto minimum with … but it seems that in at least some themes (2010,11,12) the sidebars assume somewhere around 210-30px as the maximum working width. This means that any iFrames/content inserted into those columns will need to not exceed this, which for us required a bit of adjustment.
If you find yourself interested in this, you can follow developent or contribute here: https://github.com/mattoperry/moveon-campaigns
