[wp-hackers] Two new, long-overdue plugins to make your wordpress life a little easier...

[Marcus Pope]

In the past I have lightly managed and tweaked some wordpress installs and as a result I was put on a project at my current company Springbox that was a full site development.  Through the course of that project and then two more I quickly realized two things:


1.       Wordpress is an amazing platform for rapid web development

2.       The use of Absolute URLs, and how poorly the Visual / HTML Editor behaved made it a nightmare to work with as a professional platform.

Blown away by the dozens of posts from Core WP developers that root relative urls are not possible, and after trying to do all of their suggestions to resolve my problem with none of them actually working I almost gave up on the platform entirely.  And the ludicrous concept that in order to prevent your html markup from being corrupted by the visual tab you should just disable the visual tab altogether was almost the nail in the coffin.

Alas, I don't shy away from a challenge and having over 15 years of experience with enterprise web development, and over 5 years of experience with developing my own WYSIWYG editors and extending others like tinyMCE, fckedit I realized these problems were not unsolvable.  So I've spent the last three weeks hacking away at the problem and here's what I have to offer you:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/preserved-html-editor-markup/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/root-relative-urls/

They are not perfect, and I will spend more time polishing them up.  They do work as advertised, as we have upgraded our past projects to work with them.  And ultimately they seem to be the only solutions to top requests from the community for years, which kind of shocks me.

Combined they actually make wordpress a dream to work with - sure it still has its quirks here and there, but the root-relative-urls plugin even accounts for links and media as they are embedded into the now usable wysiwyg/html editor.

Check them out, let me know what you think.  Ideally I'd re-architect the whole damn components in the WP core, but alas you know how that goes :D  They were sort of sponsored by Springbox - the company I work for - in that I got to use my free time at work to create them, and I put in a few hours a week at night (like tonight) to finish them up.  We don't have a landing page on springbox.com yet, nor do we even have a support infrastructure for handling requests, but I'll do my best to keep up with the questions and the projects.

Being a service-based agency, product development isn't a core strategy so I might be non-responsive at times when workloads are high - clients first of course - but I'm now personally vested in this platform and would like to see it continue to excel.

Thanks,
Marcus Pope
Senior Software Developer
Springbox.com