WordPress Plugins

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m the webmaster for my alma mater’s student newspaper website, HooverChallenger.com.

The site runs on WordPress, and I’ve done quite a bit of custom code to get it to look so pretty; the homepage looks nothing like a typical WordPress landing page. When Carl first gave me the design mockups for the site, I was pretty sure most of his ideas were impossible, but with some time and effort, we got the whole thing to work perfectly.

This weekend, I decided to make available some of the custom plugins I’ve created so that others can use them also.

On the font page, I use the Category Thumbnail and Postlist plugins to create boxes for each category with links to recent posts and a recent featured post thumbnail.

On the Daily Announcements page I use the PDF embed plugin to embed the PDF version of the daily announcements using the Google Docs Viewer.

On pages that include a YouTube embed, I use my own YouTube plugin to embed the iFrame video player, so the video will be available on iPhones and Android devices. Also, this will allow some videos to be embedded directly with H.264 or WebM in the future.
There were other plugins already available to embed YouTube videos in an iFrame, but they all required special shortcodes or other custom code.
My plugin integrates directly with WordPress’s oembed framework, so current YouTube embeds will use the new player without any changes to the post itself. No custom code necessary.
As a sidenote, I can see why other plugins hadn’t done this yet. The WordPress oembed functions are not really documented at all. I ran into some weird errors and my only option was to poke through the WordPress source code to figure out what was going on. Also, to make sure the new player is loaded for current posts, I had to delete a bunch of cached values in the post metadata table. Again, this was not documented anywhere, I had to figure it out for myself.

There are still a few more plugins I may release in the future. I just wanted to highlight these in particular.
I’m very proud of the work I’ve done.