Some of my own ideas include a speedometer which measures the speed performance of your WordPress installation, analyses the speed of other plugins and your themes, checks files are cached properly and suggests ways to speed up WordPress. Another idea is a magazine plugin which allows posts to be grouped together into issues which can be published together. Finally I thought of a plugin to make event posts. These event posts would have a time and date, be integrated with calendars or displayed like usual posts in the loop and have notifications.

I want your input into what I should develop. Have you ever felt that WordPress is lacking a certain feature? If you have any plugins that you want developing please leave a comment. One idea will be made into a WordPress plugin.

As a sidenote, I’m going to be away from the 17^th July to the 17^th August. If you try to contact me I might take a while to reply.

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.