I’m just about finished with testing out my first formal WordPress plugin featuring my Maui Photo Day Calendar, but while I get all the documentation and support ready for a few beta testers, I wanted to share a quick post about one of the resources I’ve used to get to this point.

Book: WordPress Plugin Development (Beginner’s Guide)

This was a pretty neat book to get started with because each chapter is a lesson on building an actual functioning plug-in that you can use right away and play with to see how things work.  It covers the different aspects of extending WordPress from simple plugins for posts, creating widgets for sidebars, adding shortcodes, modifying the Administration Panel and menus, template pages, the WordPress Repository, you name it. For someone like myself that had already started playing around with samples from different blog posts and just by reverse engineering other plugins, this title pulled everything together for me and helped lead my plugin concept into near completion.

I think one of the reasons this is a good read in my opinion is because the author gets right down to the code details without spending too much time talking.

The second reason is that he’s pretty entrenched in the WordPress platform himself, which certainly helps. Checkout the WordPress category on his blog to find out more about his constant development and interest in the WordPress platform.

First Plugin Coming Soon

Back to my efforts for a moment, I mentioned my first plugin is coming out soon. I already have it running on 4 of my WordPress blogs for testing, and just getting my ducks in a row to make it more professional looking and usable for others.

Be sure to look for it soon.

- Kris

(Image Credit: Amazon.com)

The long overdue makeover of my web development portfolio here at webnelly.com is finally underway and live now.

There will be a few kinks to work out, such as missing links and maybe a few images from previous posts, but that’s part of the process.

I went with the portfolio-focused WordPress theme, BlueBubble, and I plan on make a few tweaks along the way. Oh, and speaking of WordPress, that is now the driving engine of the site and blog, which has been the latest one of my sites migrated over from Blogger. Needless to say, I’ve been more than pleased with WordPress since starting with it last year.

The sites in the portfolio section also need to be flushed out again, but for now, all the previous pages have been moved to archive.webnelly.com.

Look for more news soon.

– Kris

About this time last week, I was launching my newest website, Maui by Photo. It’s sort of a photo blog that is aimed at other Maui fans and local residents alike to relive all their favorite memories of the Valley Isle and share them with everyone, using my photos as inspiration.  I’ve already posted comments about the new site on my Maui blog and my photography blog, so I’m not going to re-type all that here as well. Eventually it will get added to the home page and my site portfolio here as well, but only when I’m not as super busy as I am right now (more on that some other time).

The blog here is supposed to be the stuff behind the scenes, and there are certainly a few things I’m doing differently with this new site that have me really excited. I’ll list a few below (call them teasers) and hope to dive into them each in more detail as the summer progresses.

Bye, Bye, Blogger
Okay, so that might sound a bit harsh, considering I have 5 blogs hosted at Blogger, but this new guy is running WordPress, installed on my server. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have all the source, database, and everything else at my disposal and not having to deal with FTP issues between my web hosts and Blogger. I’m really excited with what I’ve seen of WP so far, and the fact that there is a ton of stuff out there that I haven’t even scratched the surface of yet. Stay tuned here, because this is one of those big shifts that rejuvenates some of my older sites and makes them new again.

Twitter x2
With some of my recent work outside of my normal routine, I fell out of the Twitterverse for awhile. Now I’m back online regularly, and also am sporting a new Twitter account to promote my new site, @MauiByPhoto. This has given me new options and responsibilities in terms of managing multiple accounts (via TweetDeck) as well as starting from scratch and organically growing a follower base just like I did with @webnelly did 2 years go. Except this time, I don’t want to take 2 yrs to get 200 followers, and I get to be more open and engaging as a “brand” instead of my shy ol’ self.

Now on Facebook
To compliment the new Twitter account, I’ve also creating the Maui by Photo page on Facebook, which was a first for me as well. Not only does this give yet another vehicle to promote my site, it presents new challenges and experience in the world of social marketing. It’s also giving me the chance to connect to new faces that I otherwise would not have found on Twitter, so another big plus there.

Unlike Twitter, however, I’m still new at the networking side of Facebook. My Twitter skills have had 2 years to mature, so it’s going to be awhile (although I wish it wasn’t) before my page’s fan count gets into the triple digits. Of course, if you’re reading this, maybe you’d like to have a look and maybe join, too.

Still More
Those are the teasers, but the entire process of launching the new site and treating it as a ‘brand’ really has my creative juices flowing.  I have some big plans for this brand over the remainder of the year, and it will be a challenge to balance this with everything else I have started and have been working on. But then again, I never really have backed down from a challenge before.

Stay tuned for more details to come, and in the meantime visit the site, follow me on Twitter, @MauiByPhoto, and pay a visit to my page on Facebook.

Mahalo,
– Kris