I Need Your Questions For Scott Reilly

coffee2codelogo This week on WordPress Weekly, I have the distinct pleasure to interview an awesome WordPress plugin developer. His name is Scott Reilly who has authored over 50 different WordPress plugins that you can browse here. It’s not too often I get the chance to interview a plugin author on the show so I’m highly looking forward to this. You can bet that I’ll be bringing up the topic related to donations, business models, and whether WordPress has been a thankless community to him.

What I need from you are questions. You can either publish them here in the comments or visit this thread in the tavern forum.

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3 responses to “I Need Your Questions For Scott Reilly”

  1. Get Custom Field Values plugin — which has been great and invaluable for years — can’t you do this in “core” WP now? If not, shouldn’t this be incorporated into core? If yes, reasons to keep using the plugin? Differences? Thanks a million, Scott, and Jeffro. Really looking forward to this episode.

  2. Dgold: I believe we got to your question during the show, but to summarize and/or clarify: the original and long-running functionality of the plugin was more of a convenience to obtaining and displaying custom fields. The basic capabilities had already existed in core, but the plugin provide a single template tag that simplified usage (sparing a few lines of code). So for the longest time it was about convenience.

    However, recent releases (particularly the just recently released v3.0) of the plugin make its usage more compelling as it introduced more template tags (to access custom fields outside of the loop, getting random custom fields, getting template tags for a particular post, etc) as well as the introduction of the widget and support for a shortcode, so now the power of the plugin is easier to use, customize, and embed in posts.

    Especially given the new functionality, I doubt the plugin or similar functionality would get subsumed into core. I could foresee some additional custom field helpers being added to core at some point, though.

    Btw, hope you enjoyed the show!

    John Myrstad:
    A1: I’m not targeting 100 plugins as a goal in and of itself, but I’m aware I’m getting close. I have a handful of plugins yet to release, and ideas for many more, so at some point I’ll likely get there.

    A2: I make plugins for any number of reasons, including: personal need, curiosity, bugfixes for bugs in core, changing/customizing core behavior to my liking, personal challenges, and as requested by commercial clients.

    I appreciate creating things that can make things easier for myself and others, and bending WP to my will :)

    A3: I develop on an ancient Powerbook G4 laptop, obviously running OSX, with Textmate as my editor. I run Apache2 and MySQL locally. I use Sequel Pro to graphically inspect/interact with the db when necessary. I maintain code using git.

    Basically, I create a new plugin directory and file in a local test WP install and code away. I do have a plugin template of sorts (which I’ll probably extract more fully as a framework at some point) that I often use as a template when starting out.

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