Here’s a challenge for some gifted and ambitious programmers looking to make positive contributions to the world of WordPress. I’ve had three ideas lately that I think would be really useful for WordPress users.
- AdSense Auto-Extender for Sidebar
- Web-Wide Comment Tracker
- Wordpress Info-Wiki
AdSense Auto-Extender for Sidebar
Some people treat ads like they were wallpaper, and believe they’re just supposed to cover your entire freakin’ website. I’m part of the school o’ blogging that tries to use ads a little more tastefully, and integrate them into the site design. This requires being sensitive to context. I’d love to have a strip of text ads running down the sidebar, but as you know, doing so would mean that when I have short posts, the strip of ads awkwardly extends the page, and creates a giant blank spot once the content ends.
I’ve found a customized solution thanks to iZachy’s smart skip-ad coding trick. You can read all about it here (site is currently down: click here for Google Cache), but it does involve some awkward code-tweaking and custom-field-creating. I’d like to see an AdSense manager plug-in that lets you specify rules like this:
- If it’s a short post, don’t put ads in the sidebar.
- If it’s a long post, please put ads in the sidebar.
- If it’s really long, just keep replicating the ads all the way down.
Who’s up for it?
…And They Will Know You By Your Trail of Comments
This wouldn’t be a plug-in for WordPress. It would either be a separate web application (like MyBlogLog, but with more flexibility), or a Firefox extension. Do you ever visit sites and leave comments, and then forget to check up on them to see if the conversation has continued? I know I do. I’ll visit a blog, participate in the conversation, but then get distracted by the links and forget what blog I was even visiting.
Just for the sake of being a good person with excellent follow-up skills, it would be lovely to have my “trail of comments” tracked somewhere. Imagine an interface that lets keeps track of your commenting habits. For each entry, it will tell you:
- Name of (and link to) the site and post you commented on
- Your comment
- Comments after yours (with an expandable tree view that lets you show/hide these)
- Sorted in reverse chronology (most recent first).
- You can browse, search, archive and dismiss (delete) your comments.
- You can flag important conversations.
Wordpress Info-Wiki
In creating my Upcoming Releases Project, I was looking for a way to allow public, automatic contributions to the list. I couldn’t find one. Something like what I’m going to describe would be extremely useful for public projects, group collaborations, or small-scale Wikipedia-like endeavours hosted on Wordpress. Imagine a plug-in that allows for the following:
- Public submissions to a group calendar, list, database or blogroll.
- Submissions must be cleared by a moderator
- Fields are customizable. That is, the moderator can create a form that can require up to 10 custom fields. In my case, for the Upcoming Releases Project, I would include these fields: Your Name / Your Email Address / Artist Name / (Dropdown: Select Album or Tour) / Release or event date: / Website source / Other details
- A tool for customizing the output, much like the options interface for Rob Marsh’s “Similar Posts” plug-in.
In its simplest form, it’s just like your regular old comment form on everybody’s blog. User inputs data, data is posted. The difference is, administrators can easily decide upon the form fields and customize the output.
Here’s hoping that Lorelle will be one day be able to post about these plug-ins on her site, or maybe they’ll show up on the Weblog Tools Collection. If you like these ideas, please tell your smart programming friends. If you ARE a smart programming friend, ask yourself the deep, searching question: would I like to be even MORE awesome than I already am, and help develop some groundbreaking new plug-ins and applications? I think you’ll find the answer, as always, is a resounding “HELL YES.”
People who already make great plug-ins, who would be great at making these:
- Mike Jolley at Blue Anvil, co-creator of the Secure and Accesible PHP Contact Form.
- Mike Cherim of Green Beast, the other co-creator of the Contact Form.
- Steve Smith of Ordered List, maker of the brilliant WP Tiger Administration.
- Rob Marsh, inventor of Similiar Posts.
Kevan Gilbert is a life-size replica of a 5'8" tall human being, and comes with several interchangeable outfits and a realistic haircut. In the daytime hours, Kevan works as Project Coordinator of Creative Technologies at Vancouver’s Union Gospel Mission, overseeing an online strategy that raises over $700,000 a year. When he’s not spending time with his beautiful wife Kendra in their hometown of Burnaby, BC, Kevan is available to meet, chat and collaborate.
I would love the comment manager thing. There was an idea like this on MyDreamApp, but for forums.
BTW, if you respond to this, I probably will forget to come back and look.
It’s too bad you’re going to forget to come back, because I totally edited your comment after you submitted it, and I turned your awkwardly-pasted URL into an actual link. Oh, the things we all miss out on without this uninvented comment tracker.
By the way, did you notice my hip new random-words feature? Press “refresh” and you’ll notice that each commentor doesn’t just “say” things, they also cackle, groan, whisper, and elaborate. (That’s another thing you’d miss if you forgot where you posted.)
KEVAN, yes to the ad-justable ads. VIRB does a nice job with their ad integration, very nice actually. This is not an argument to use it, but I have some fun stories. I’ll tell them later.
I very much appreciate on flickr the “comments you’ve made” page. good ideas.
(mostly just excited to see how I have said this)