Mark Parolisi » Applications & Plugins

WP Dashboard Widget API

Mark — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:00:46 +0000

WordPress is a highly extensible CMS, however utilizing some of its features can sometimes be a real chore and untidy code. Taking a cue from the sidebar widgets API, I developed an API to more easily create dashboard widgets. After installing the plugin, just write a class with a ‘widget’ method and optionally a ‘form’ method (to handle widget configuration), then call the register function on your classname.

Here is a link to the WP plugin link:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dashboard-widget-api/

And here is the actual hosting of the repo on GitHub
https://github.com/markparolisi/wp-dashboard-widget-api

* I know that I still need to fix the documentation on this. Expect an update very soon. *

MailChimp Archives

Mark — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:29:33 +0000

******* Attn: this plugin is no longer supported *******

MailChimp has a solid API but a lack of WP plugins utilizing it. This plugin fetches your campaign archives and either creates them as posts in your WP database, or just displays them live by fetching them from MailChimp upon request.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mail-chimp-archives/

Custom CRM

Mark — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:35:09 +0000

This client felt that current tools such as vTIger and Sugar CRM were bloated and had a steep learning curve. Therefore he commissioned this custom application for his organization, which manages teams of call centers selling various products.

The application some standard features like:

User management with roles/permissions
Campaign and sales team creation and management
Reports section to track sales data throughout the organization and organize by sales team and utilizing charts from Google Charts API
And a blog feature, so administrators can send out notices.
A repository for training materials for each campaign.

U/I Features

Accordian menus
Pop-out date pickers
TinyMCE
A live clock

I’ve also incorporated a time clock into this system. Not only does it record clock-in and clock-out times, but it also computes wages, allows users to request for time off, and notifies site administrators if users are late or forgot to clock out at the end of the day.

Meetup Feed2Post

Mark — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:09:51 +0000

This plugin will automatically update your WordPress site with calendar posts from your Meetup.com account.

Upon activation, a new category called ‘Meetup’ is created. At a regular interval, currently once a day, this plugin fetches a group’s Meetup.com RSS feed provided in the admin option panel and parses the data into a new WordPress post. It stores a custom field called ‘GUID’ into the post with its value being the unique identifier of that particular RSS entry. Every interval it will check the feed, update the previous posts and enter new ones as it finds them.