Plugin Ideas


Published on January 29, 2008 at 1:50 PM EST
Last updated on January 29, 2008 at 1:54 PM EST
In the Discussions category.

Banter about some new recipes

The recent realease of both Movable Type 4.1 with the Professional Pack and a stable build of MTOS has been keeping me on my toes and awful busy with work for uiNNOVATIONS. I keep looking forward to a slightly slower period when I’ll be able to put some time into some of the plugins I have in mind.

  • Grammar Teacher started life as a plugin that Elise asked for: she manually goes through every comment on Simply Recipes and cleans it up before publishing, and is hoping for a plugin to automate that. This plugin will do things like change two periods to one, capitalize “i,” and cancel the effect of overzealous commenters (think: “!!!?!??!?!!?!?”) amongst a few other details. An element I added for myself is that it will do proper title-casing according to the Chicago Manual of Style. This plugin is actually pretty close to being finished, I think. Do many people have interest in such a plugin?
  • A massive update to Better File Uploader is in order to really take advantage of all that MT4.1 offers. (Could this become version 3.0? Perhaps.) Custom fields to hold all of the information entered while uploading, thumbnailing and Resize on Upload presets are on my list, along with quite a few other ideas. This is a long way off, months and months, for sure, but I’m trying to get ideas together.
  • I think the asset inserter could use my touch, too. Most obviously, I see a big need to be able to insert multiple assets. Would the Better Asset Inserter be a part of BFU3.0? Maybe, but I have a feeling this is a large project in itself and might be best separated from BFU.
  • An assets-aware and MT4-compatible version of Icon-o-matic.
  • I have an idea for a fun plugin. Something rather unrelated to Movable Type and likely quite useless, but something to laugh at that should be easy to implement. I may slap this together after finishing with Grammar Teacher…

So many ideas, so little time! Any feedback you might have is appreciated!

…And I’ve just realized that I still haven’t updated EDSMT with MT4…

This article is tagged as: Better File Uploader, Icon-o-matic, MT4, Plugins

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Comments

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1

By Carlo [TypeKey Profile Page], written on February 3, 2008 at 10:59 AM.

I think the thumbnailing and resizing presets on upload are really needed. BFU is amazing but sometimes my authors get a bit confused. They have to get used to it at first and few don’t get used to it at all (those that aren’t comput saavy hehe). Anyway.. if I come up with any new ideas i’ll pitch em over.

2

By Ann Ray [TypeKey Profile Page], written on April 22, 2008 at 6:22 PM.

Here’s one I just sent to MT (with several other usability/documentation pleas):

Point and click conditional content. There are 27 tags in the Logical category, showing all the signs of getting tacked on as features were added over the years (at times I felt like I was in If Hell). I expect most could be replaced with a single tag driven by a pop-up to set the conditions. Even better if I can define a set of conditions such as “Main Index or Category Template or Search Results” and save it for use in multiple places (without manually coding variables).

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