[wp-hackers] New plugin for plugin authors to showcase their plugins on their site

[Dougal Campbell]

I did something similar on my site a couple of weeks ago[1], though I 
just used the already-existing Plugin Info plugin[2], and a couple of 
custom page templates. My main "Plugin Listing" page template just does 
a query for its child pages[3], and lists a summary of the plugins. Then 
each plugin page uses a "Plugin Detail" template which utilizes 
shortcodes from Plugin Info to pull in the plugin repo details, then 
displays the individual page content (if any) at the end.

I used the additional page content on my FancyBox Gallery plugin page to 
include an in-line demo of the plugin in action[4].

So the main different between what I did and your plugin, I suppose, is 
that I had to do some additional work to create my page templates 
(custom query and loop for listing page, extra calls to "apply_filters" 
in order to expand shortcodes in snippets for different parts of the 
page). Past that, it's pretty much the same process for me to detail a 
new plugin. I just create a new page, set the plugin slug in the field 
that Plugin Info provides on the Write page, and publish!


[1] http://dougal.gunters.org/blog/2010/01/13/plugin-pages
[2] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/plugin-info/
[3] http://dougal.gunters.org/plugins
[4] http://dougal.gunters.org/plugins/fancybox-gallery

On Jan 16 2010 11:46 AM, Mark Jaquith wrote:
> Like many plugin authors here, I have many of my plugins in the wp.org
> repository, but I also want to showcase them on my own site. Until
> now, I've been managing them on my site manually. This has proved to
> be a giant pain — so much so that it makes me dread updating my
> plugins, as I know it'll involve a tedious update of their
> representative pages on my site.
>
> I wrote a plugin to remedy this.
>
> http://txfx.net/wordpress-plugins/i-make-plugins/
>
> In order to make the page above, I did the following:
>
> 1. Pages>  Add New
> 2. Title: I Make Plugins
> 3. Parent Page: WordPress Plugins
> 4. Publish
>
> That's it! It's getting all its info from the plugin repository, using
> the API calls available within WordPress. The info is cached in
> postmeta, with an expiration.
>
> It also auto-populates the listing page:
>
> http://txfx.net/wordpress-plugins/
>
> Both pages have templates (using WP shortcodes, of course) so that you
> can customize their layout.
>
> Now you can manage your personal plugins showcase just by updating
> their readme.txt file. Hope this is of some use to you!
>
>    


-- 
Dougal Campbell <dougal at gunters.org>
http://dougal.gunters.org/
http://twitter.com/dougal
http://twitual.com/