A quick web search should help you find the right tutorials to have your theme make use of this new comment system… and soon you’ll discover a new function called wp_list_comments() that would simply dump out all the comments with correct markup for comment threading. AWESOME. For the most part, everything wp_list_comments() does is pretty good—It gives you good markup that you can easily style and some options.

But one thing I could never find out how to do was replace “says:” in the default comments template. After lots of forums and searching, I discovered that the only way to replace that text would be to write your own callback function to display the comments. WTF?! That’s a lot of work just to change some simple text! definitely NOT worth the effort… so instead I wrote a simple plugin to change the text after the page is loaded.

Says Something Else takes a set of words that you define, and replaces “says” in the comments area. if you define more than one word, it will replaces “says” with a randomly chosen word from the list. Pretty simple. Download away!

i think this would be my first time taking a dive into actual wordpress development. in the past i’ve only helped people style their blogs or do css tweaks and random javascripting… all stuff dealing with presentation, but nothing really with function. those of you who actually come to this site (instead of just seeing this in your reader) may have noticed i started using this plugin that looks like this:

it’s a plugin called SexyBookmarks… i know… i didn’t name it. it’s not the first result in a google search. but i thought it to be a pretty well made plugin; designed rather nicely and cleanly and more or less functions like it’s supposed to. when herman had some issues w/ the plugin a few days ago i started looking into it and got in touch w/ the developer, josh jones to propose some fixes. he seems like a really nice guy and even gave me some credit for some of the patches i made that made it in:

i’m still in contact w/ him hoping to get a few more changes in if they get accepted. doing wordpress dev on this plugin has kinda got my feet wet and i wanna work on some plugins of my own so maybe soon this site will have a section of my plugins.

i think the first plugin i work on will be to make a “via” plugin to give credits to artists/blogs herman’s been asking for this functionality for a while. maybe there’s a plugin for it already… i didn’t search. in any case, i figure it should be a pretty easy plugin to start on. after i think i’ll make my own facebook connect plugin because the ones i see out there don’t work out of the box that well and i think there must be an easier way!

wordpress users out there… any plugin you want me to try to create?

i’m looking for ideas. we’ll see how long this run goes or how long this slowness at work lasts.