Opinions on my new WordPress plugin

Hey guys,

I've just written my first WordPress plugin and put it out for consumption. Admittedly, not doing a huge amount of promotion for it right now, but I was wondering if you guys would mind checking it out and giving me some feedback.

It's a pretty simple concept, so it should only take a few minutes to test...

Give the plugin the slug of a category or tag and it returns a list of the n most recent articles with that category or tag. There are only a few settings to check out, so again, it won't be that difficult.

I'd really appreciate it, and once I've gotten good feedback I'll give credit (and backlinks) from a few different blogs for those who've helped. You can find the new plugin here.

Thanks again!

 

ooh! I like that...I've bookmarked and will test it out later! If it works out I will blog about it too

 

Thanks arwen54! Anything you think I need to change or add to make it more useful, just let me know.

I actually wrote it because I needed to do the same thing for a site I'm building. I figured it would be useful for anyone who runs a site that delivers news in different categories on the same page.

 

Wow, that's pretty cool. Is it possible to use a template tag (for use in theme files) as well? There is another plugin that does the template tags but it's pretty outdated. I think it would make a good feature for yours.

 

Thanks fish...good suggestion. I'm actually already working on providing ways to call with options to override the settings. I can add the template tags in with the next version as well.

 

very cool plug in - have people been downloading it?

 

I actually tried to activate this plugin. It triggered a fatal error.

Looking at the code there was a lot of \par and \tab and slashes before the brackets } and {. Removed all of those and there's still some sort of error I can't pinpoint.

 

Thanks fish, I haven't tried to install from the .zip. I'll try it on a different blog and get it fixed.

 

Okay....try again. Sorry about that.

 

That's usefull tool. I like it.

 

So far you guys are the only ones who've downloaded and used along with a couple of local friends. I've submitted it for WordPress to accept. I guess it's just a waiting game for them to include it and get it set up with Subversion. Again, I really appreciate you guys checking it out and giving feedback, and I'll reciprocate with some link love.

 

Okay, just tested it again. Seems to be working fine with the updated version.

Thought I would add some suggestions:

1. Tempalte tags (already mentioned that above)
2. Make it so you can define how many should be displayed in a specific list, like [cattagart slug-name 15] for 15 posts to be displayed.

I'll let you know if I think of anything else.

And some bugs...

1. It displays drafts and other hidden/protected posts in the lists.
2. If you make a list of the "default" category...stuff other than posts show there, like images, etc.

 

Thanks fish...

The bugs are taken care of, thanks for finding those.

I thought of another feature I'll add in the next version along with the template tags and settings override suggestions. Currently the plugin returns both pages AND posts, but in the future version I'll let the user choose one or both.

By the way, I hadn't thought of using this to control the order of categories for a sitemap...I really like what you did with it on your site!