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Plugins

This is a page where I’ve collected the WordPress plugins I’ve either written or modified enough that I feel as though my version should be shared.

Category Word Count

This is my version of a plugin that appears to be dead. Basically all I did was update the plugin to work with the new taxonomy system added in Wordpress 2.3… which happened to involve gutting a lot of the code. It has a pretty straightforward purpose, and the usage is very simple.

Just put the following code somewhere in your template, where x is the category_ID of the category you want to count:

<?php cat_word_count('x'); ?>

The original plugin also had an option to count the words in all categories, but I didn’t see a use for that, so I didn’t bother including it.

Download Version 0.1 of Category Word Count

(Last updated 12/7/07)

LightWindow WP Plugin

Lightbox plugins are fairly common, and I’ve seen several different implementations, but the best ones combine the lightbox effect (or something similar) with something that automatically applies the effect to all linked images. I need the effect to be automatic because I want to be able to install it on the sites I manage without having to train every blog author on how to add the lightbox effect.

There are several different flavors of the lightbox javascript, but the best implementation I’ve seen so far is LightWindow, which works on pretty much every type of media under the sun. It also automatically resizes the lightbox to fit your browser window, which is definitely a must.

There didn’t seem to be any full-featured WordPress plugin for LightWindow, so I hacked together one of my own from the spare parts of a few others. It’s fairly quick-and-dirty, but it works for me.

This plugin is a combination of the following:

  1. LightWindow 2.0 by Kevin Miller. If you like the LightWindow effect, please send the guy a donation. Also, make sure to check out his page to see how to use all of the different functions.
  2. LightWindow Beta test 1.0 by Peppe Argento. This plugin is short and to the point - it adds the LightWindow CSS and JS files to your WordPress header. Most of the LightWindow plugins I found stopped at this point.
  3. Lightbox 2 Plugin by Kjell Bublitz. This is where I got the code to automatically filter posts and apply the “lightwindow” class. I modified it to match the LightWindow settings and pared it down to the basics. Right now my plugin only adds the lightwindow class to linked images. Anything else has to be changed manually.

Download Version 0.1 of the LightWindow WP Plugin

(Last updated 12/7/07)