FiddyP

Win your own plugin!

I’ve had some phenomenal traffic and trackbacks to the CommentLuv plugin page since I made it and with all that action it has upped the plugin page to a PR of 6.

Now, I know PR isn’t so widely worshipped as much as it used to be but, PR is like money… it’s not until you have it that you realize that it’s not that important. Unless, you don’t have it and then it seems like everything will get better if only you did have it!
So here’s an idea that could get someone the fame and fortune that comes with writing a new plugin, I’ve written a few custom plugins for this site and I thought it might be nice to run a contest for the chance for someone to be the offical site for the plugin. (beware, I have had literally thousands of comments on the commentluv page! so be prepared to get a ton of your own comments if you win)

The link for the plugin page on the plugins’ dashboard page would point to the winners site.

The winners site will be the ‘official’ place for the plugin so it will be shown in the readme, on the wordpress codex download page and anywhere else someone writes a review of the plugin. If I update the plugin then I notify you and you can update the plugin release page.

The choice of plugins:

• Contest Notify
  This plugin checks a category and if there’s a post in it, it slides a div down containing the excerpt of the post and a link to the page. It also looks for a custom field called “prizepic” and retrieves the url of the image to be used.

  It’s pretty basic at the moment because I just use it myself but I see some areas of improvement such as putting all the settings in it’s own dashboard page so a user can change the title and style of the box so it can be used for all sorts of featured posts instead of just contests…

• Close comments per post
  This is a simple plugin that looks for a custom field called “closecontest” in a post and checks the date given and if the post is after that date and time, it closes the comment form. It’s really useful for time specific posts like contests or when you ask for opinions on plans you have that are about to start.
• LivingPostImage(requires Curl and Flickr API)
  This is a fairly adaptable plugin for putting an image into a post. yey! well, there’s a little more to it than that. It does require the user to apply for a Flickr API but that’s quite a simple process and free.

  I call it Living because it always gets the latest public picture for the search terms given so the picture changes over time which helps to keep the posts looking like new. It can search for terms you give it or use the title of the post or the first 3 tags of the post. It outputs the html to display the picture directly or can pass back an array of url, page url and title.

• Custom Scripts Per Post
  Simple plugin that allows you to include javascript in the head of the page for a particular post only. It’s pretty useful if you write tutorials or you want a particularly snazzy bit of script included for just one post. Just give the path to the script in a custom field called “myscripts” and it’ll be included for that post.

So, what do you think? any suggestions or ideas? I think it could turn out to be a pretty good traffic generator for someone….

Filed under: Blog News, Blog Tools, contests | Tagged: contest, giveaway, plugins, traffic