So I decided I was going to write my first plug-in for WordPress about a week ago. I felt it would be a good addition to WordPress users. It’s currently in development now so I’m not going to specify just what it is quite yet.

Having danced around and around the WordPress Codex, I wasn’t getting very far. Issue number one is: I’m not a PHP devleoper – yet! However, I got a long way very fast by reading through this tutorial by Ronald Huereca. I’ll give an update soon, when my plug-in is released.

If you’re struggling with the WordPress APIs, and want more insight to developing a plug-in for WordPress, check this out:

How to Write a WordPress Plugin

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I have at times struggled with CSS because I didn’t fully understand what I was looking at when modifying WordPress themes. Then I came across this resource when doing some jQuery work. It is unbelievable what you can do with CSS. I always thought it was remarkable before, but WOW, this really opens up a new avenue of theme customization for me.

W3C CSS Selectors

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Came across this terrific article about website usability. May be a little dry for some, but essential for any web designer/developer. Just one question: shouldn’t the title be “30 Usability Issues Of Which To Be Aware?”

30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of

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Photo Essence of Lynnwood, Washington needed a new, dynamic Web site to compete with regional professional photographers. The client had few requests:

1. Keep the site elegant
2. integrate a slideshow feature on the landing page
3. integrate a Flash gallery browser
4. provide a way to automatically update his photo galleries.

I decided to choose the WordPress platform because I was impressed with the ease of implementation and breadth of features for this framework. I was pretty sure I would be able to exceed the customer’s expectations by providing additional features with minimum development time.

One example of this is the Shadowbox JS plug-in, enabling visually engaging photo galleries that are easily customizable. See it in action on the site: http://www.photo-ess.com/blog/?page_id=42

I convinced Photo Essence that including a blog would be a great way to get higher rankings on search engines. As the site accumulates more and more content, that content is getting indexed by search engines, and thus, more and more views by potential customers. Blogging is so easy now and there are many applications out there to write and publish blogs including Microsoft Word 2007, Microsoft Live Writer, or even e-mail to post a blog.

Lastly, I developed tools to enable the client to quickly and easily update galleries with one or two mouse clicks. I wrote a small C# application which uses Photoshop APIs (OK, this is getting technical…) to take his high-resolution photographs and resize them, create thumbnail images in a specific size used in the WordPress photo galleries, save them in .jpg format, and finally, FTP the finished pictures to photo-ess.com. I’m going to write another blog soon on the C# application and PhotoShop scripting features. It’s really pretty awesome.

Below are some screenshots, but please visit the live site: www.photo-ess.com.

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