I’m excited to be presenting at WordCamp Toronto 2013 on October 5/6.  This will be my 5th talk in Toronto and my 9th WordCamp presentation since my first in Toronto 2 years ago.

My talk will be an introduction to WordPress plugins:

A Peek into the World of WordPress Plugin Development

Curious about what’s inside a WordPress plugin? This session will give you a quick introduction to the construction of WordPress plugins. As we build a simple plugin to add a widget to your sidebars, I’ll summarize the resources needed to help you create your own plugins.

While you will definitely will need to learn PHP, HTML and CSS to create plugins on your own, no coding ability is required for this session. You will be able to create your first plugin by pasting the example code into files on your web site.

Hope to see you there!

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/

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.