Writing, Fantasy, and Science Fiction
Yesterday, after a week of working, polishing, and dithering, I published my first “how-to†post. Yay me.
I was really happy to find a plugin called SyntaxHighlighter Evolved to make my code stand out from the supporting text. It allows me to copy my source code into the post editor and preserve things like spacing while also highlighting different language elements.
But …
Do you think you want to write a plugin to enhance your WordPress site? Looking for a how-to guide to get you started? Let me tell you my approach.
I’m not going to get into the philosophy of plugins – what makes for a good plugin, what should be in a plugin vs. what belongs in a theme, plugin programming best practices, etc. Those will be touched on in future posts. Today I’m writing a how-to article describing how to write a simple plugin.
By the way, this plugin will not qualify for inclusion in the WordPress Plugin Repository. That, too, is a topic for another day.
When setting up a WordPress site one of the first questions to ask is which plugins do I need?
About the only thing everybody agrees on is that the Hello Dolly plugin that comes with every WordPress installation is useless. I’ve heard a bunch of explanations why it’s there, but the bottom line is that nobody uses it. So what else?
Probably the first thing you should do once you have WordPress installed and running is to get rid of the admin account, if you have one.
Admin is the default administrator account. Many WordPress installers already give you the option of having a different name for your administrator, but if you didn’t get that option (or decided to go for a “pure default†install) you need to get rid of it, because it is the number one target for hacking a WordPress site.
Unfortunately you can’t simply rename an account. What you can do, however, is to create a second administrator account (with a different name, naturally) and then delete the first one.
Here’s how:
Hello world! Welcome to the relaunch (yet again) of my website. It’s been here since, oh, I don’t know, 2004? No, 2003. Eleven years. Makes me feel old.
Anyway, this time around I am implementing it as a WordPress site — using WordPress as the blogging and content management system. At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen.
Unfortunately, I like to tweak things. Make changes. Break things, and then try to fix them. But I only like fixing things that I’ve broken. I’m not wild about fixing other people’s mistakes. So I’m warning any visitors in advance that this site will be changing its appearance at unpredictable times. If you’re nice you’ll give me feedback about what you like and don’t like. If you’re really nice you’ll also let me know when you find the site broken, so that I can go about fixing it (or start ranting about whatever evil outside influence broke it on me!)
