Last Saturday at WordCamp Philly, I ran a session on “Building a Plugin in One Night”. Together, with about 50+ attendees, we brainstormed ideas for a new WordPress plugin that I could code that night.
The brainstorming went great, coming up with some good ideas… like plugins to:
- Help first responders after a disaster (Big Idea!)
- Add VIM (a Linux editor) shortcut commands to the Visual Editor
- Disable the Visual Editor on a per-post basis (The Winner)
- Allow users to create pages from the front end
- Add easy donations
- Log into WordPress via Google+ (Brian did it!)
- Add syntax highlighting to the Visual Editor (Chris did it!)
The concept that the audience voted for me to work on was a way to disable the Visual Editor tab on a per-post basis. The motivation for this is the fact that the autoformatting of the Visual tab will sometimes break a complicated (or not so complicated) HTML structure ruining your code. Folks wanted a way to say, “Hey, WordPress, back off on this page/post”
And someone (you introduced yourself to me later, but I forget your name) came up with a kick ass name: Don’t Break the Code. It explains the purpose and also harkens back to my days at Haverford College, which has a strong social/academic honor code.
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