Projects: You choose

I am an ideas man. I get loads of ideas but tend to go off them quickly. All of which is an easy way of saying that I like to rush in headlong into each personal project and get coding, leaving the complicated thinking until later on. Never a good way to run a project but interesting for personal projects as it often leads onto other things. The chaps (and chappesses) over at the Reader Appreciation Project have got me thinking that if I am going to spend lots of time coding things for the sake of it then I might as well write something that someone actually wants.

This then is a call out to my readers to give me direction and get me to code something you might actually find useful. There are however a few limitations:

  1. It must be in PHP, or PHP + Javascript;
  2. If databases are involved then MySql only;
  3. If a CMS / Blogging platform plugin is needed then Wordpress only;

The reasons for these limitations are personal ones. First, I am (again) considering getting Zend certified so I am reading the PHP certification stuff and trying to remember the bits I don’t know as best I can. I’d rather not deviate too far from that. Secondly, if you are using PHP then why not use MySQL? most people do so let’s not vary too far from the mold. and Finally I have pretty much set my stall out with Wordpress. I think it is the best platform and I have taken time to learn it, so it seems reasonable to stick with it.

Previous Ideas

I’ve laid out a whole host of things in my posts of the years, some not possible without oodles of cash, and some quite possible. These are some of the ones that I don’t think are too far out there, some of which I started work on, some I didn’t:

Open Source Content Management

I have been yacking on about this for a while. I thought it might be an interesting idea to develop an entirely new open source content management platform, publishing the planning, and the code and soliciting ideas along the way. Not a simple task but possibly an entertaining one.

The core idea of this is development blogging. Write a class then publish it and let people debate it in the comments.

Code Crowd Surfing

That brings me on to another idea I had while walking to the shop at lunch time today. There are loads of open source classes out there that do all sorts of things. It occurred to me that a web 2.0 style site, where someone could upload a class, then let anyone submit changes, with a description, which other people could then vote on. Once it passed a certain threshold ratio of yes to no votes the change is added in, presumably thereby making the class better, or faster, or more secure.

Nice n’ easy documentation for open source hobbyists

This is something else I have written once, then re-written and still don’t like the code and so is just sitting on my machine. The idea is that there must be loads of PHP hobbyists out there who don’t want to get into the whole thing of writing doc blocks and commenting code and simply want a nice and easy way (for which read Web 2.0 site) to write some useful documentation and give the world access to it.

Of course I may be wrong, perhaps no one wants to do that, but I find plugin documentation tools tiresome and I never seem to get the result I want.

Wordpress Community Trust Plugin

I wrote about this fairly recently. The idea is that bloggers can assign trust levels to readers that comment on their site. These levels of trust can be exported to bloggers who are part of that network of trust so that they can decide who to trust, or not to trust for future comment moderation.

Better Admin Themes for Wordpress

One thing I think wordpress really lacks is a decent admin theme facility. I want to create admin themes the way I create site themes, simply upload to a directory and turn it on. I’m not sure how easy the plugin architecture makes this, but if TigerAdmin can do it once, presumably it can be done as standard.

The Options

So, do any of these sound interesting? Do you have any better ideas? let me know, give me a project to work on. In the meantime I will point to a previous Wordpress plugin I have written which allows posts to be filtered based on two categories, instead of just one. It was written a fair while ago but should still work OK.

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Andrew Rickmann

Andrew Rickmann is a financial compliance specialist, part time blogger, photographer, and WordPress fanatic.

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