My little WordPress plugin side project is taking on a life of its own. As you know, last month I adopted two plugins: Seamless Donations and Better Recent Posts Widget. Seamless Donations is an important plugin doing great work for worthy causes and I’ve been a long-time user of Better Recent Posts Widget as part of the ZATZ Archive site.
Together, all ten plugins have been downloaded more than 215,000 times.
To those plugins, I’m adding eight more adoptions. Old-school radio guy Jon Pearkins was the creator of eight very cool plugins. Personal issues are requiring him to step back from maintaining and supporting them. Together, they are known as the “jonradio” plugins and, in fact, each plugin name began with “jonradio”.
Like the other plugins I’ve been adopting, these are plugins I’ve used (with one or two exceptions). They’re excellent and users (as well as some of my own sites) rely on them. There are two major plugins:
- My Private Site: turns a site private, only for logged-in users
- Multiple Themes: allows you to assign different themes to different parts of your site
Additionally, Jon created a number of helpful support plugins:
- Shortcodes Anywhere or Everywhere: lets you use WordPress shortcodes just about anywhere on your site
- Reveal Network Activated Plugins: for multi-site admins, shows what plugins are running where
- Remember Me: makes the Remember Me login checkbox “sticky”
- Perpetual Calendar: manages dates from 6500 years in the past to 8000 years in the future
- Display Kitchen Sink: force the second icon line of the WordPress editor to always display
- Current Year and Copyright Shortcodes: quick and easy shortcodes to display the current year and a copyright symbol
Adding Jon’s eight to the two plugins already is a wonderful and awesome responsibility. Together, all ten plugins have been downloaded more than 215 thousand times. There are thousands upon thousands of them in live use on sites across the world right now.
Since I’ve started adopting plugins, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting site developers all over the world, seeing the work they’re doing and the challenges they’re overcoming, and it’s been a truly rewarding experience.
In terms of road map, my goal with all the plugins is to make sure they stay up to date and any security issues are dealt with as a top priority. My main coding project is with Seamless Donations, and you can follow all of my technical work on the Lab Notes feed. In the meantime, stay tuned. I have a feeling these aren’t the last plugins destined to make David’s Home for Wayward Plugins their new home.
