I had an amazing conversation with Brandan Sera-Shriar during lunch here at WordCamp Toronto. He is involved in a lot of very interesting projects and is also a teacher at a College!!!

Building plug-ins in Wordpress is very easy and does not need a lot of programming knowledge. A great way to get started is to take a plug-in and copy and paste the code and develop a new one.
There is a limit to what a plug-in can do and will want to customize it to whatever you want. Look is just as important as functionality in a successful plug-in.
HTML/CSS, PHP and MySQL skills are great to have
Check out the source of the plug-ins and make small changes. See what the effect is. If the plug-in is from a good source then it will be well documented. This is the best way to learn. Do this on your local host so that you don’t crash your site.
Design a basic template that you can use overall when designing multiple plug-ins.
He does not release his plug-ins to the community however if you do want them he will make it available to you
Plug-in 101
- Create a folder in the /wp-content/plugins/pluginname/
- Give the plug-in a name.
- Describe, authors. This is standard stuff.
- Comments section
- Add code for option menu
- Setup the Options Page
- Register the activation and deactivation hooks
- Function
- Save as a php file
Side bar info…
Breadcrumb
Can have one database for multiple sites with different look and feel.
Wordpress plug-in competition is coming up for 2009.
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Here’s what people were doing during the break.
More discussions

Sacha posing

Plug-in side discussion

Just playing around

Mathiew

Rannie and I in a shoot off

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The afternoon at WordCamp Toronto, started off with Mark McKay talking about video blogging.

He showed us some examples of videos on You Tube. Happy Hour is his own show. Dear Toronto has their own style of videos.
He will be on MTV on Thursday at 6pm with his view on the election.
How to make a better video blog?
- Think before you speak
- Plan out what you want to do or say
- Video about 2 minutes
- Compress video before uploading
Saw the 61second video posted on Michael Geist, Boing boing
Learnt about video microblogging, 12 seconds
Lot’s of software out there and use whatever you have available to you. Vegas, Premier and Avid.
Take note of the lighting in the room
Video sharing great on Wordpress, Delicious, Facebook, MySpace, Mdialogu, TubeMogul,
Talked about Viral Videos by entering contests. Have no plans to make money of the videos and just wanted to get noticed.
Mark has a green screen in his basement and now paints a wall green where he lives. Today it takes the form of a green fabric and has good lighting. DVgarage is a great plugin.
Convergence of a video blog and TV station. Each video blog is a show. Try to keep it to all one idea. Video blog is the internets version of a TV show.
Give it away and let people watch it.
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No cheeseburgers

Gotta have the ketchup

Yummie, dessert

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Here are some more pictures from WordCamp Toronto.

Hole in chair

Thirsty again

Accessories

more accessories

Tweeting

Let’s trade moo cards
Hmm I do need to get that Wordpress Gallery up and running.
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