Milburn

Last time, I was showing you how to create the cool drop caps on my blog. The only problem was that I was having to write extra mark-up into each post to generate the drop caps.

Extra mark-up is bad. It’s bad because if I wanted to change blogging platforms or even change theme I would have to go through every post and page and remove the HTML mark-up. Not really too difficult with only 4 posts to date but if I have a hundred or so posts in the future, it becomes a real pain.

The perfect solution would be to incorporate the mark-up in my Wordpress template. Unfortunately I can’t do that because Wordpress uses a template tag called the_content(), this only accepts a few variables to modify the “Read more…” link. I needed to come up with a better solution. A fairly simple solution would be to hack about with some other functions to create a modified the_content() template tag.

While this is a much better solution I don’t really like hacking the Wordpress functions. Instead I decided to build a plugin. It sounds like rather a lot of work for applying a tiny bit of styling but it enables me to create an admin page where I can turn the drop caps on and off at the click of a button. Not only that but I can offer this wonderful plugin to the rest of the world using Wordpress to create wicked drop caps.

My thanks go to the brilliant Ronald Huereca who wrote devlounges “How to write a Wordpress plugin“. I used his code along with taking a peek at some other plugins.

I decided that while I was at it I would fix another issue with my blog theme. I use a first-child selector to choose the first paragraph of each post and make it bold. This breaks in several ways, firstly IE6 doesn’t support the selector and secondly The first paragraph is sometimes not a paragraph of text. It might be an image. To counter this my plugin also marks the first paragraph starting with a capital with a “first-child” class which I can use in my stylesheet.

My plugin can be downloaded from my plugins page and from the Wordpress Plugin Directory Of course for those who don’t want to write their own CSS like me the plugin automatically adds it’s own stylesheet to your page.