I’ve been thinking of several plugins I want to write, but don’t currently have time. My time should be focused on the Google Summer of Code project and bringing the rest of my sites up since they’ve been down.
What I have so far:
- Feed Statistics – A feed plugin that tracks the statistics of the feed. A hosted version of FeedBurner with minimal feature set.
- Automatic Post Queue – Tracks the current upcoming posts and sends the posts to the future, so that no more than a certain amount is posted per day without manually checking.
There are several plugins I have written so far that need to be revisited. The Swift Mailer needs to be looked at and fixed. The Swift Mailer needs to have localization added, as well as other enhancements to the attachment handling. The administration is still broken and needs to be fixed.
There is also the WordPress Performance Testing Plugin, that needs to be extended in its feature set as well. I’m going to focus some more on this after the Google Summer of Code is over. I’m looking forward to using it in my own development.
I think that in September, I’m going to work on my plugins and develop the above plugins. I also want to create a theme for this site and buy several themes for absidongames.com and dragonu.net. I want to finish those sites up and hopefully get them going to where I don’t need to maintain them very often. Just add content.
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The feedstats thing doesn’t seem too useful – especially when feedburner exists.
The postqueue thing is a good idea – though it’d need an over-ride button as some things need to happen now or not at all.
A nice feature would be ‘Add X minutes’ by default, so that even if publishing immediately there is a small delay (yes, we should ‘preview’ -but I often forget)
Also, a nice option might be "time restrictions". E.g. In the UK I might not want a post to appear before, 2pm, or after 10pm (so posts are new when the bulk of my readers are up, in UK and USA) – a US author might say 7am to 5pm for similar reasons…. or someone might allow 6pm to 6am only, to inhibit posting during their working hours (to ward off accusations of blogging at work!)… or they might only allow posts during a short window of time, so that their readers know that the update will be at 3pm.
So:
Options Settable by plugin
1) No less than X hours between posts (queuing as needed)
2) No more than Y posts per day (queuing as needed)
3) Restrict times when posts appear
4) Minimum delay for futurepost (e.g. any post going live ‘now’ is delayed for X minutes into the future, I’d suggest a default of 10 minutes – this is to protect against the ‘Doh!’ as soon as you hit publish).
Each of these could be enabled/disabled separately in the plugin.
All of these (where enabled by default) would be shown as checkboxes on the edit screen (on the right) , and could be unchecked for a given post – and the time would update straight away to reflect the options for that post.
On the edit screen, there’d be a box that says ‘this post will be published at’.
On ‘publish’, this is copied to the actual publish time as per the usual wordpress place which stores times.
If the user manually set the publishing time, this’d over-ride other considerations.
Once a post has had its publishing time set, a subsequent post would not change it (this’d be important if a later post had its time over-ridden and so were published earlier – it saves database lookups!)
If an unpublished post were edited and re-saved there would have to be consideration to what happens (my inclination is ‘no change’ – but there could be an update button).
Perhaps editing a future-published post with a time already set would display ‘update publish time to XXXX’ button (where XXXX reflects the time if the post were brand new.
It’s a good idea, though, hope these suggestions give you food for thought – there’s a lot to consider!
Thanks Murk,
The reason I want to do the feedstats, is to learn that I can do it. I think it would be nice to learn how many people are visiting my feed without having to use FeedBurner. I don’t think it will be that difficult either. Probably take about a week to complete.
The idea is that each hit is registered by WordPress, so it is possible to record the unique IP. Most feeds ping often, so recording each page hit wouldn’t make sense. It would require two tables I believe. One table for the raw statistics and a second table (or could use posts metadata).
There is also the Automattic Stats plugin which should be recording how many accessed the feeds, but for some reason I’m not getting that statistics.
The thoughts and ideas for the Queue plugin are really good. I’m most likely going to use most of them.