sharing the wordpress love

wordpress-love

WHEN I AM PASSIONATE ABOUT SOMETHING, it’s hard to shut me up. I love plants, and frogs, so I blog about gardening; I love being a sister (well, most days I do), so I blog about that, too.

In the year or so since I left my fancy job as EVP/Editorial Director at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia to live happily ever after at my dining table in a tangle of Mac laptops and self-cloning to-do lists, I’ve fallen in love one more time: with WordPress.

logo_bigger-1WordPress is the best blogging platform there is, and it’s also an open-source community, a fellowship of users who give one another WordPress love in the form of shared code and shared knowledge. You take, and you give back.

Until now, the only giving back I’ve been able to do officially is to co-sponsor WordCamp New York last October (and again for 2009).

logo_bigger-1Though I am not a developer, it has been a key goal to give the WordPress community back some code in return for all I’ve used. (As the WordPress.org footer says: “Code is poetry,” and I like to think I’ve finally added a sonnet to the vast library, albeit a ghost-written one, with many to come.) Its title:

Category Mapping Plugin for WordPress MU

Not Emily Dickinson or Shakespeare, but sweet.

logo_bigger-1My friends Brad Williams and Brian Messenlehner of WebDevStudios authored the sonnet for me, bringing to life the functionality I imagined and needed to operate The Sister Project blog network like a real network. If you have a multi-user (WordPress MU) network and want the top-level page to function like a portal, bubbling up posts from the other blogs, this is really going to help.

Of course, being the original (and only!) user these last months, I’m already impatient for Version 1.1 (2.0?); just ask WebDevStudios,  sponsors of the WordPressWeekly Podcast and organizers of the new WordPress New Jersey meetup group, how many times a day I IM them about some wild new idea.

So here it is, world: our first plug-in, Brad’s and Brian’s and mine, like every good thing in WordPress the result of cooperation and collaboration. You can let WebDev tell you more about it, or go visit its page in the plugin repository, where all such works are listed.

logo_bigger-1Without such lines of WordPress poetry, my life wouldn’t be as beautiful. If you have questions about WordPress or WordPress MU, contact me at awaytogarden at gmail dot com. I’m no expert, just a real, hands-on user, but I know an increasing number of people in the community who can help you bring more poetry into your life, and would happily share their contact info…share the WordPress love.

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P.S., the photo up top is a screen grab of a captioned image I submitted last year to Liz Strauss’s “Brand-New Blogging Feeling” contest, and was a winner. To me, WordPress is as loveable as one of my big green frogboys, and you know how I feel about them.