Ricky Spears' Blog » Web Development http://rickyspears.com/blog Empower. Challenge. Advance. Sun, 28 Feb 2010 03:14:09 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 My First WordPress Plugin: “Zap Read This Post” http://rickyspears.com/blog/2006/08/my-first-wordpress-plugin-zap-read-this-post/ http://rickyspears.com/blog/2006/08/my-first-wordpress-plugin-zap-read-this-post/#comments Sat, 19 Aug 2006 04:27:54 +0000 rickyspears http://rickyspears.com/blog/?p=140 I just finished writing my first plugin for WordPress! It’s called “Zap Read This Post” and it places a button before each post that says, “Zap Read This”. When a user clicks on the button it will open a new window and load the text of the post into Zap Reader so that visitors can quickly read the text of that particular post. Do you see it? Well, what’cha waitin’ for? Go ahead, click it, and try it out!

Writing this was much easier than I initially expected. I looked at the code for a couple other plugins that added something before or after the post, and reviewed the WordPress Plugin API. I was up and running in no time.

I had initially hard-coded a button last weekend when I made the site live. That was certainly more challenging than using the APIs and doing it right. :) If you have a WordPress blog, know a little bit about PHP (or are willing to learn), and want to make your blog do something new and interesting, then I strongly encourage you to spend a little time investigating how to create your own WordPress plugins. You’ll have a lot of fun, learn a lot, and contribute to your neighbors on the web as well.

Find out more about the “Zap Read This Post” plugin for WordPress.

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