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Jeff Chandler

Plugin Created By A 10 Year Old

Making the rounds on Twitter today is a WordPress plugin called Dashboard Site Preview that allows you to preview your website from the WordPress dashboard. The plugin was created by 10 year old, Jesse Friedman who goes by jesseenterprises on WordPress.org. According to Brad Williams, this guy attended WordCamp Philly in 2011 and used what he learned at that event to create this plugin.

Dashboard Site Preview adds a widget to your dashboard which is a simple iframe that shows you the front-end of the website. For widescreen monitors, you can maximize the use of the preview by setting the dashboard to display widgets in 1 column.

Sitedashboardpreview

Not quite sure if this will save time when compared to other methods such as displaying the front end within another browser tab or within a browser window on a secondary monitor. However, this plugin excels at being a great learning experience for Jesse. I don’t know about you but I think it’s very encouraging to see younger folks getting involved with coding. After all, Matt Mullenweg believes that scripting is the new literacy.

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19 responses to “Plugin Created By A 10 Year Old”

  1. Way to go Jesse! Keep at it. :)

    Tho it’s making my youngest look bad. She’s 11 and hasn’t coded anything for WordPress yet. Poor kid. :D

  2. Congratulations to Jesse Friedman!

    Agreed with Matt – that programming is an important form of literacy. Plugins are a great way to build skills.

    Matt Mullenweg is not the first to call for recognition of programming as a literacy issue that should get wider attention. Not by a long shot …

    Over the years & decades, the extent of programming-literacy promotion directed toward ‘average’ people has declined, dramatically.

    Stories like Jesse’s are good to hear.

  4. I told my son he should get into creating plugins but he is stuck on xbox. Wait til he see this!

  5. @Tom Gonzalez – … Or, there is the (Xbox) XBMC Media Center:

    “… a free and open source cross-platform … it has a skinnable as well as user-configurable interface and plugin support.

    Tho, it uses Python, instead of PHP.

    But for real, it is notoriously difficult to ‘direct’ programming training. Nor is early experience, aptitude or expressed interest a particularly strong indicator of future ability/success in the field of programming & software development.

    Take for example the lead developer of a product called WordPress: Matt Mullenweg was primarily into music; he attend a special High School for Music & Art. He began messing with code, in hopes to salvage a roundly-mocked script called “B2” for use in managing his out-of-control indulgence of photography.

    And the rest is history. Matt the ardent saxophonist & shutter-bug went on to create … Jazz-Quotes.com

    But that is pretty striking – having another kid write a plugin. Good luck. :)

  7. @Chris Wallace – 4 is the perfect age to start withholding parental affection and expressing your disappointment in his poor coding skills.

  8. My son has one more year to beat that….lol. He just turned 9 last month.

    It is amazing what people can do with WordPress. That is a handy plugin… not something I would use, but for others, it might be really useful. :)

  14. That rocks! What an amazing feat for a 10 year old! I won’t admit my age, but will admit to struggling with HTML! Congrats, and best wishes. Kid, if this is your passion, you’re gonna set the world on fire! :)

  17. It works really well and no problems with multisite.

    I think this would be particularly useful to anyone running a lot of sites and multisite installations, jumping quickly between dashboards – a quick glance tells you that the site is displaying correctly without having to separately visit the homepage.

    It would be even more useful if the site preview widget could appear on the Manage Themes page, it would make testing different themes a lot quicker.

    Honestly, I’m beginning to think that this should be a standard part of the WordPress dashboard.

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