I had [su_highlight]several hundred articles[/su_highlight] on Jukkasoft. It had been a journey of tad less than 11 years. User counts were up, visitors booming. My relative boom!

Then I wanted to actually delve deep into WordPress development. As I am a wetware engineer, going into tech is in itself rewarding. It’s new territory to conquer. Writing code and writing articles actually both work as mental exercise.

Nerd Sniping? Yes. Useful? Hope so!

Plugins are the sauce of a WordPress engine. Plugins have been used throughout the known universe, both time- and space-wise, to make most everything.

A WordPress site is composed of few basic ingredients:

• database
• WP engine (PHP code)
• an active theme
• plugins
• a configuration

Desired qualities of Plugins

Neat plugins make an improvement that is understandable, (somewhat) necessary, useful to at least a good bunch of people (one will do, for starters), and easy to use.

The freedom to experiment is wonderful. There’s probably not a plugin that would be useless, for the person who writes it. I haven’t written any plugins, yet. So the first ones will be pretty simple.

I do have a dream of a plugin, called ‘Diamond’ (what an original project name!?)

The Diamond plugin would allow to experiment with simple tinkerings, kind of like A/B test the effects of very simple changes to the blog; a change in a WordPress theme being used; perhaps just as simple as a background color, text style or similar.

The idea is that you could check the numbers, whether the changes in your blog’s visitors is positive. Increase in visitor counts and certain similarly headed statistics would tell you indirectly that at least you didn’t screw up!

I believe people vote by their true online actions. If the blog is not visited a lot, it simply doesn’t yet contain interesting stuff, OR it has some impediment that makes the content hard to access.

WordPress plugins explained

[su_youtube_advanced url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm9aQiLEa10″ controls=”alt”]

WordPress plugin dev rules of thumb

• use ‘return’ within the plugin PHP code
• do not ‘print’ content from a plugin
• register the plugin’s entry points
• use comment section to provide metadata for WordPress (it will understand your plugin better)