Category Archives: projects

The Flying Developer Role Plays

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I think my inner nerd has finally taken full control of me.

I recently started playing Dungeons & Dragons (4th Edition) after listening to the podcasts Penny Arcade did at Wizards of the Coast (who publish D&D). I’m DMing the Keep on the Shadowfell campaign for a bunch of other new players. We’re all thoroughly enjoying it. And yes, that makes us all thoroughly nerdy.

I don’t have very many miniatures, which is a problem because 4th Edition relies heavily on moving characters and monsters around on a grid during combat. There are many alternatives (such as Lego men, dice, or other small objects), but I wanted something a little slicker. I wanted my game pieces to have a uniform look and feel, and not break the immersion by forcing the players to think too much about what each item represented:

“Ok, so the quarter is a goblin, and the dime is an orc. No wait, the dime is the goblin, and the quarter is the orc. Got that? Oh, and 3 more goblins appear from around the corner. Does anyone have any change?

I had a look round online for ideas for replacements, and found several people had made their own tokens using images found around the web. To be honest I was disappointed by these, as they were usually mismatched and of dubious quality. I needed a better solution. Continue reading →

Roadmap for wp-reactions

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I have already had some feedback on wp-reactions, which is great! The plugin was downloaded more than 50 times in the first 12 hours of being online, which I’m really pleased about. What I want to do is share with you guys the direction I will be taking the plugin in. I will link to this post from the plugin page and keep it up to date as new releases come out.

Current Features (version 0.6.6)

Features that are working in the current version:

  • Add reactions to new posts. 100% complete
  • Manage reaction descriptions for future posts. 100% complete
  • Ability to apply reaction updates to all existing posts (not just new ones). 100% complete
  • Add CSS classes to the generated markup to allow authors to style the form as they see fit. 100% complete
  • Include an option to add ‘question’ text before the reaction form. 100% complete

Upcoming Features

Features that I am currently working on:

  • Have different sets of reactions for posts in different categories. 0% complete
  • Add a cookie/IP based filter to prevent users from posting the same reaction multiple times. 0% complete

Future Features

These are features that I want to include in the plugin at some point, but do not have a concrete plan for yet:

  • Stats Tracking. 0% complete
  • Give authors the option of making the reactions mutually exclusive (i.e. Users can only check one reaction per post). 0% complete
  • Internationalize plugin. 0% complete

wp-reactions Released!

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Well, here it is. I’ve finally come to a point where I’m happy to release my WordPress plugin to the public. I plumped on wp-reactions for the name and 0.5 for the version number. I have a number of extra features I want to get in before version 1.0.

It is by no means complete, but the functionality that is there works 100%. At least it does now. There was a bit of a panic when it first went up because I was stupid and left out some important test cases. Oops! Oh well, live and learn. The most current version (which should work) is 0.5.2. Download wp-reactions here. With any luck you should be able to see it in action on this very post!

Reactions Plugin Update

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The WordPress ‘reactions’ plugin that I’m working on is coming along well. In fact, I actually have a demo! Take a peek at my testing blog to see it in action. You can check any of the boxes next to the reaction text (cool, interesting and boring) and see the number of ratings updated.

The plugin itself is still not ready for public release. If you look at the demo, you’ll see that you can un-check a box after checking it and the counter will still go up. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that needs changing too:

  • The reaction text is hard coded. I need to write an admin page that allows the user to specify the reactions they want to display and some extra php to actually display the correct text on the page.
  • As mentioned above, the UI needs some work. Specifically, the check boxes need to be grayed-out after being clicked to to prevent users spamming the system.
  • It would be nice to have some sort of check performed to see whether a given user has already rated a post and correctly display this information on return visits.
  • I would eventually like to have an admin tracking page that can be used to display the highest ranked posts for each response. I would also like to implement a widget that can be used to display this information to visitors if desired.

The last two points probably won’t make it into the first public release, as they aren’t essential to the functionality of the feature. The first two are essential though, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to work on them sometime this week.