programming WordPress plugins

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I was hav­ing trou­ble find­ing the right Word­Press plu­gin for a clients web­site … so I pro­grammed it!  You can see the results of the Related Links Blender plu­gin at the bot­tom of this post.  The plu­gin is a sim­ple but effec­tive way to keep vis­i­tors brows­ing your blog.  Sim­i­lar plu­g­ins existed, but none did exactly what I wanted.  Pro­gram­ming the plu­gin was an inter­est­ing exer­cise — always be learning!

Plugin features:

• Choose which posts to link
• Just add the post ID of the tar­get you wish to link
• Links include thumb, title, and brief intro­duc­tory text — automatically!
• Links can be struc­tured and styled to suite your website

All about the plugin:

Related Links Blender is a Word­Press plu­gin to make cross link­ing your posts and pages easy. Vis­i­tors will be pro­vided with top­i­cal read­ing options at the end of the cur­rent post.  Search engines will get more content.

Links to tar­geted posts are added at the end of a post’s con­tent.  The tar­geted post’s title, thumb, and a cou­ple lines of text are used to con­truct the link.

The links are cho­sen in a post’s edi­tor page in a cus­tom options pane.  Just enter a comma seper­ated list of post ID num­bers to which you wish to link.  Also included in this options pane is the cur­rent post’s ID num­ber — help­ful when set­ting other posts to cross link to this one.

The Related Links Blender plu­gin has a set­tings page in which you can cus­tomise how the inserted links are con­structed and styled.  This requires some basic HTML knowledge.

The Related Links Blender has been released as open source and is being hosted and dis­trib­uted through the Word­Press plu­gin repos­i­tory.  You can read all about the plu­gin, down­load it, and get sup­port at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/related-links-blender.