Welcome to June. I still have nothing to show for my dream of a WordPress Plugin. It has become vaporware. I’ve been far too busy and far too lazy to do much as of late. I could come up all kinds of excuses though.

My plan, and I really want to follow through with this, is to be back at it by the end of the month. I really DO have a lot of stuff going on, but if I can manage to manage my time well, then I’ll sure end up with enough time to put in some effort here. It would be great to have several hours per day free, but at the very least I should be able to do an hour or so if I’m still heavily involved in other things.

I did at least fix the feed so it works again.

This is my plan…hold me to it, please

I should be able to make some good progress this weekend. I have plenty of time to do so. I’d love to be able to have a beta out by the end of the weekend (my weekend goes rather long, so I actually mean the middle of next week, mind you… )

Previously, I was creating a RSS feed by hand for the project. What I’ve done now instead is to create a category on my blog in which to post everything. WP is nice enough to create a feed for the category, which will then serve as a project feed. I only had a couple of items in the feed previously, so it was simple to go back and create posts for those. The old feed url redirects to the new one.

Coding has begun on the backend. When will anything recognizable be finished? I have no idea. Hopefully this weekend I’ll come up with some time to get going on it

I came up with a new idea for another plugin to work on. I’ve decided to create a list manager that will be fully usable from within the WP admin interface. I want it to be easy to use, so I don’t want the user to have to edit any files at all beyond just placing a function call in their sidebar or wherever they’d like it to show up. At the same time, it’s going to be flexible so that the user completely decides how it will display the list and it will be usable for multiple “types” of lists.

My thinking behind it is that I can use it to maintain lists like “recently watched movies” and that sort of thing. It will also be capable of doing todo lists and anything else you can think of.

LisTorium currently is some ideas jotted down in a notebook and some more ideas floating around in my head.

The project’s official page contains basically this same info for now and will be updated when I have a beta ready. There is also an RSS feed if you’re interested. You can always leave a comment or send me an email (see the sidebar) if you’d like to updated on the project’s progress as well. The latter two options I will update whenever I have some noticeable amount of work done, even before the beta.

When I was running MT, I maintained lists of movies, books, and music. I did that by creating separate blogs within MT, having them output to a simple template and then pulling that data into my sidebar using PHP. I didn’t immediately see the same kind of functionality working with WP, although I’m sure I could make it work like that. I was at work one day thinking of what I could do, and the idea popped into my head of a list manager. I came up with all kinds of ideas for things it could do. I was all excited and when I got home I searched and searched for a list manager plugin…. and I found one. I was initially put off because I was trying to do something original and then it occurred to me that it doesn’t matter if someone else has already done it. There’s no harm in having two of the same thing. And besides, I had come up with all kinds of ideas for what I wanted this thing to be able to do, and when I looked at this other link manager it just didn’t do some of things I had in mind. I briefly thought of extending the existing plugin, but then decided against it because a) I want to do something on my own this time, and b) I just didn’t like the way it handled things.

It should also be interesting to do a project from scratch using versioning software. I got myself setup on wp-plugins.org right off the bat so I could utilize subversion to it’s maximum (although technically, I can create my own local repository now if I want to).

The project is pretty much some ideas of what I want it should do written down in a notebook right now.