HN Show & Tell: the WordPress Console

[sant0sk1]

Awhile back, raganwald created a thread with the sole purpose of discussing what the community is hacking on. Not start-ups and/or business, but just hacking on for fun in our spare time. I really enjoyed that conversation and would like to have more like it.

With that goal in mind, I suggest we use Saturdays to highlight our open-source and/or side projects that we're working on. Saturday seems like a logical fit since it is generally a slow news day, and what better time to talk about our "weekend projects" than the weekend?

So, to get the proverbial ball rolling, I submit to you my most recent side project which I released earlier this week, the WordPress Console.

http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2009/06/introducing-the-wordpress-console/

If you've developed in Rails then you know the joy of script/console. I have been writing a lot of WordPress plugins for clients lately, and wanted a way to interact with the development environment similar to how I can when writing a Rails app. This desire resulted in the WordPress Console, which is a plugin that creates an in-browser shell where you can execute arbitrary PHP code with the full WordPress env loaded.

It isn't a huge technical achievement or even all that challenging to create, but it is kinda cool, imo. The project is also still wet behind the ears, but usable.

What do you think? Worth developing further? Have ideas to make it more awesome? Anybody want to join in and hack on it with me?

[sant0sk1]

This thread, now with clickable links!

official plugin page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-console/

announcement blog post (w/ screencast): http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2009/06/introducing-the-wordpress...

source code on GitHub: http://github.com/sant0sk1/wordpress-console/

[tonystubblebine → sant0sk1]

I love this. You're so right that every development environment should have a great console.

[euroclydon]

I want to make a site called: ratemysyllabi.com where users can submit, into a categorized database, course syllabuses for any topic. Other users will comment and rank them. The purpose would be to provide learning guidelines for everyone in one central place, rather then their current scattering across various university wensites, and to take a step toward an open-source university.

The data structure would be rigid, not just document uploads, but field-by-field entry in order to maintain consistent structure, searchability, and to quickly move miscategorized data.

I am becoming a skeptic of the utility and value of a four year degree. In particular the way the tax-exempt "public" money is spent and allocated. I think Wick Sloane makes a pretty strong case for the antiquity and corruption in the modern university system in this Thomas Paine style essay:

http://www.insidehighered.com/content/download/229351/290798...

[tonystubblebine → euroclydon]

I think this is a great idea and has much bigger potential. One of the themes in publishing right now is that the money has gone out of content, since there aren't enough people willing to pay but that there's still good opportunities in curating (for example what hacker news does).

What if these syllabi were made up of free blogs and articles, like Spolsky's Best Software Writing.

[tonystubblebine]

I launched a side project the other day to let you post longer messages to Twitter. You write whatever you want and then it updates your twitter with a summary and short url to the entire message.

I have it up as lngtwt, but I think I'm going to launch it officially as big.ly.

http://lngtwt.com

My particular use case is that I often want to respond to someone on twitter with a longer message and I don't have convenient access to their email or want my response to be public. This comes up all the time in support. There will be a bug that is being discussed publicly on twitter and I want to send those people a solution in a way that anyone following the discussion can see.

Here are two examples:

http://twitter.com/tonystubblebine/statuses/2349633865

http://twitter.com/tonystubblebine/statuses/2244340758

One thing I like about small side projects is that it lets you start with fresh code, which is helpful for testing out plugins. This one uses the Rails twitter-auth module, which was really easy to setup.

[bkrausz]

I just got really interested in making a Domino's Boxee ordering/status app, but I need to teach myself Python and figure out how to work it into their API.

[scott_s → bkrausz]

http://diveintopython.org/

[daeken]

Writing a language spec and prototype compiler for a new language, Ultilang (the name is by no means final). A few friends and myself came together and developed a list of features we would have to have for a one-size-fits-all language, and it's been designed from there.

Brace-based syntax parsed into an s-exp; real macros operating on this expression tree; multiple backends (CLR, JVM, Python at the very least); strongly typed and type inferred, with optional dynamic typing; no difference between statement and expression context (so nested structures a la Nemerle are supported); Nemerle-style pattern matching.

The goal is to build a fairly small language on top of existing frameworks, and let users fill in the gaps with strong metaprogramming. We'll see how it goes.

[aneesh]

I'm a sports fan in general, and a cricket fan in particular. I've been working on a structured data repository for cricket matches to facilitate sabermetric-type analyses.

Repository: http://data.againstthespin.com

[sidmitra → aneesh]

wasn't aware of sabermetrics before you mentioned it!

[aneesh → sidmitra]

It's a very cool field, and it's been around for longer than most people would think. Follow @againstthespin on twitter if you want to get my (infrequent) thoughts on the subject. And read Moneyball by Michael Lewis if you want a brilliant writer's thoughts on the subject.

[cturner]

Writing a shell on a java application platform with the principle that "everything is a filesystem". Shell is really mininal - just enough to browse the application, launch an editor and trigger simple programs in jvm languages like js, objective-j, jython, ioke and whatever else they like.

Achievements so far? I now have the beginnings of a shell, filesystem API (that was pretty simple), and a jython implementation of ed with basic functionality but some bugs. :)

[sidmitra]

I was making a tinyurl clone in appengine that opens multiple urls. Silly really, but i hadn't seen that done before and i thought it would be useful. But i just saw this (http://fur.ly/) today :-(

[tptacek]

A 24"x18" poster for Black Hat, my BH talk (vulnerabilities in stock exchange order handling systems and trading protocols in general), and helped Chris and Mike with their BH paper (Ruby for penetration testers).

[abyssknight]

I'm working on getting re-motivated and attempting to avoid burnout at work. I'm also trying to get a side project up and running in Django with a coworker of mine. Just installed gitosis and created the first repo, so its time to write spec and check some code in. Hopefully we can put one of my old domains to good use. :)

[mitchellh]

I launched a side project to help out UW students: http://uwrobot.com

And a ruby interface to the U of W student portal: http://github.com/mitchellh/RubyUW/tree/master

Fun fun fun.

[nibrahim]

I'm spending my free hours trying to write a Steampunk themed vertical shooter game using PyGame. The code is at

http://github.com/nibrahim/Xenon-Retroblast/tree/master

[csomar]

"Not start-ups and/or business, but just hacking on for fun in our spare time."

Hacking for fun means, we code on things we like. If we try to find an idea on how to make them useful, this will be much more better. What do you think?

[ddemchuk]

I'm 90% done with a Rails app for social book summaries. It allows people to search for books, add a short summary (less than 500 words), and choose their favorite summaries for each book. Over time, each book will have the highest rated summary attached to it.

I'm not trying to pull a Fahrenheit 451 and diminish the value of books, I just got really annoyed during finals last semester when I was trying to look up book summaries for books I had already read to refresh my memory and everything I found was longer than necessary. I just want something quick and simple.