Interview

Who doesn’t need out service.

First I’ll go over who the tool is not for. If you have never messed around with PHP then this tool is not for you. However I would say that you should remember our tool in case you want to hire someone to create a custom widget for your site or need to have one modified. It’s pretty easy to find someone who has some experience with PHP, but not so easy to find someone with experience creating a WordPress widget for PHP. Our tool lets a PHP programmer (or even a tinkerer) with no WordPress experience create a widget in less time that it would take to find all the documentation that they would need.

If you are use to messing around with PHP and just need a quick widget for you’re blog and you only have one blog you want to use it on then you can just use the Executable PHP Widget plugin or for a lot of things you can just use the standard text widget. For some widgets you might just be able to use text widget. The text widget let’s you embed some html in the a widget which sometimes is all you need.

Who might find our service useful

If you find yourself hacking away at functions.php or widgets.php then you’ve found out that you need to be very careful about the auto updater as this wipes out your changes. Most of these type of changes can be extracted and put into a widget and our tool makes this very easy.

Another time you might want to use our tool is if you find yourself creating a executable widget on every blog you create. It’s easier to create a stand alone widget in this case and again our service can help here.

If you have a service of your own and you want to have people use a WordPress widget to access some part of your service then our tool can really help you. You don’t need to learn anything about WordPress. You can just create the PHP code to access your service and then in a few minutes you can turn it into a WordPress widget. Also if WordPress changes then as we update our tool you can create a new widget easily for your original code. For example WordPress will be updating it’s API with version 2.8 and we already have a way for you to create your Widget in the pre 2.8 way as well as the new 2.8 way.

This is powered by Google Voice. I’m not sure if you can get in on the service yet unless you’re along time user of Grand Central as I am, but it’s a cool update of the old Grand Central Service.

1. Quick code generator

I tried to make something available to users that are not ready to sign-up for an account yet. I hope it enough for them to get more interested and not just dismiss it as to very simple tool.

2. WordPress 2.8 code generator option

WordPress 2.8 is adding a whole new way of supporting widgets with the new WP_Widget class. I’ve took a stab at creating a generator for this way of doing things as well. That’s one of the great things about having a generator like this is that now you can generate your Widget in both ways. You don’t have to figure out each way.

I’m still having a tough time getting the details of what the WordPress code wants from a plugin. For example here’s the notes for parameters to the constructor of the WP_Widget class.

var $id_base;       // Root id for all widgets of this type.
var $name;          // Name for this widget type.

What is a widget type exactly? What do you want it to be? What name space is it in?

I guess this is why I created this service in the first place. If was easy to figure out than I wouldn’t have wanted to create a tool that lets me easily take care of all the details from me. All I have to do is figure it all out once. And for you it should just work.

Plus few other tweaks where added here and there in these release.