TheGarage Tech Blog

Writing a large complicated plugin for Wordpress is not a trivial thing. The required skillset  touches on just about everything there is to know about Wordpress and Internet technology in general. I’m sure after you get a few apps under your belt the process gets more straightforward.

Even though the core  concepts of Internet computing  are the same for Wordpress  as any other platform I’ve worked with in the past, the toolset, including the programming laguage, is entirely different. Not that I don’t like and enjoy writing code in PHP, it’s just new and I have not been nearly as productive with it as I would be with a language and development platform that I have used frequently over the past couple of decades. I’m starting to get fairly profecient now though.

I had to go back and tweak most of my completed code because of a change I made to the map handling on a page. I needed a better way to manage multiple maps on a page than the hodge-podge I had initially. The change allowed me to provide for better helper maps depending on the context of the click. The pages should have been set up that way in the first place but this has been a learning process.  Debugging the ripple effect has been time consuming.

The major functionality on the admin side of the plugin is complete, but the list of little things that need to be done to tidy up a plugin if you are serious about releasing it seems to never dwindle. For every couple of things that get ticked off the list another couple of things are added.

The only major functionality left to complete this intial beta release is to integrate a user interface for creating cache activity logs. I have to decide the best way to integrate the functionality. A few of my options are:

• use the Wordpress comment system
• use SimplePress Forum
• use BuddyPress forums

My first choice was Simple Press and I spent a few hours messing around with it but for the second time out of three installations of Simple Press I had problems getting it to work out of the box.  So then I looked into Buddy Press forums and it’s a nice option but having Buddy Press as a requirement to run a simple gecoache manager is overkill. Maybe the next generation will be Buddy Press or bbPress application.

The Wordpress comment system is probably the easiest and simplest solution.  I’ll make a decision today.