My first official Wordpress plugin is complete and ready for distribution.  Named “Twitter Visual Stats”, this plugin is a “widget” that adds a visual Flash-based graph to your site to show visitors your increase in the number of Twitter followers over time.  There are several basic configuration parameters that you can set once the plugin is activated, so you can customize it for your site.

I have just submitted the plugin to the Wordpress.org site for approval and upload to their CVS repository.  Until then, I have made the plugin available on my blog through the following download link.

Download link: http://blog.4minds.com/downloads/twitter-visual-stats/

Installation instructions are included on the page link above as well as in the ZIP file as “readme.txt”.

Feedback

I need it, please.  Tell me what you think of this plugin. Be brutal if necessary, but please give me feedback.  If you have suggestions for improvement, I’ll take them into consideration.  Leave your comments on this post below.

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post on building a sidebar widget for the “Social Media Page” plugin from Philip Norton.  After playing around a bit more with the widget code, and taking a look at another widget example, “Twitter Widget”, I managed to break my code out into another separate file which I will describe here.
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I’ve finally taken the plunge into learning how Wordpress development works.  I don’t claim to be an expert, but the following information might be useful to someone with very little programming experience but the desire to add a new social media widget to their blog site.

First off, I download the Social Media Page plugin from Philip Norton, found on the Wordpress Plugin Directory.  The installation instructions are fairly straight forward, so I won’t reiterate them here.  Basically, after the install, you enable the plugin and go add your social media site login names.  Doing so will store the entries in a new database table that was created when you initialized the plugin.

I realized that plugin was only build to display your links on a new page, and I wanted to instead display them in the sidebar as you now see over there on the side of the page.  To accomplish this, open the social-media-page.php file and insert the following lines toward the bottom of the file:

/* Widget section added by Brian Richmond – 4Minds Internet Group
Replace the existing social-media-page.php to get widget functionality in your blog site
*/
function widget_social_media() {
?>
<h2 class=”widgettitle”>Social Media</h2>
<?php echo smpCreatePage(); ?>
<?php
}

function init_social_media() {
register_sidebar_widget(__(’Social Media’), ‘widget_social_media’);
}

add_action(”plugins_loaded”, “init_social_media”);

This code will register a new sidebar widget that you can add using the Wordpress administrator.  Once you upload the new file to your server, the widget should be immediately available to add to your site.  If you have configured your usernames in the Social Media Page properties, the links will show up immediately on the page.

Note that I’ve slightly modified the code inside of the smpCreatePage() function to result in the output that I wanted to see on my site.  Feel free to play around with the output to match your own needs.  Let me know if you’ve found this tutorial useful.