Today I released my first plugin, a widget to display a Meetup badge and a link to a Meetup Group. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/r3df-meetup-widget/

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I built the first version of it earlier in the year to use on the Ottawa WordPress Group website to link to the Meetup website.

In preparation for my one of my WordCamp Toronto 2012 talks I realized it was a simple plugin that would be a good example for the Intro to Plugin development talk.  To release it I had to polish it up a bit for public consumption.

That involved:

  • Adding an options interface so that you could set the Meetup group url and name, which up until now had been hard coded.
  • Creating a readme for release on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.
  • Creating screen shots and a header image for the repository.
  • Tidying up the code.
  • Adding an uninstall routine to remove settings.

I have a few more plugins I plan to release, but they are also not yet in a publicly consumable state and will need some clean up before I can release them.