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WordPress Plugin: Plugin Notes

This is the outcome of a couple of hours of Friday night coding after an open call by Chris Coyier over at Digging into WordPress. Here’s what Chris asked for:

Ever look through your list of plugins and forget just exactly what one of them does? I know they have descriptions next to them, but that doesn’t always speak to exactly what you are using it for and why. This plugin would just put a text field in each plugin field you could type some notes in there, theoretically to keep information about why and how you are using this plugin.

And since I was bored (and thought this was a pretty useful idea), I delivered. Plugin Notes is exactly what it sounds like.

Once you install and activate, the plugin adds a link “Add plugin note” that lets you add in a little note next to each plugin. It’s totally ajaxified and full of cool goodness. (Unfortunately, I was a bad programmer and didn’t make plugin gracefully degrade when javascript is turned off. Sorry, folks. Maybe next time.)

Plugin Notes: adding a note is easier than milking a cow.

When a note is added, it shows up inside a little blue box and includes the name of the user that added the note as well as the date and time when the note was added. You also get handy dandy options to “Edit” or “Delete” notes.

WordPress plugin: Plugin Notes - blue boxes make things look pretty.

Each plugin can only have one note. I can imagine there would be cases where multiple notes may come in handy, but those would be rare so I’m passing on that functionality.

The plugin is pretty simplistic, and unlikely to see any future feature additions (unless someone really, really wants one). I’ll keep a watch for compatibility with future versions of WordPress though, so rest easy.

Excited, enough? Grab Plugin Notes (from the WordPress Plugin Directory) or download it from within WordPress.

Note: you’ll need PHP5 and a javascript-enabled browser for the plugin to work.