I was thinking yesterday, that an auto-linking plugin would be useful for WP, and it seemed that [Joel Bennett]'s acronym plugin (that tells you what things like WP and IRC and TBWITWW are) could be adapted to do what I wanted. As it turns out Joel is also on the #wordpress IRC channel as Jaykul. Of course at first I didn't realize that Jaykul is Joel. Let's see what happens...
<flashback>
Time: 5:06pm CDT June 27, 2004
edited for brevity
<morydd> Hmmm... I wonder if I can combine the acronym plugin and the linkifier plugin, and make something that auto-replaces things like [my brother] with links.
<jaykul> yeah
<jaykul> why not
<morydd> hmmm... looks hard.
<morydd> mostly because I don't know crap for PHP
<jaykul> lol
<jaykul> you should be able to modify the acronym plugin directly.
<morydd> yeah, but I like the idea from the linkifier of only grabing stuff you mark.
<morydd> so that a quote from someone else about thier brother won't link to my brother's page.
Here I attempt to do this myself.
<morydd> hmmm.
<morydd> that didn't work.
<morydd> duh... if you change a variable name on place, you should change it everywhere.
<jaykul> Morydd: http://www.huddledmasses.org/wp-content/plugins/source.php?file=autolinker.php
<jaykul> *poof*
<morydd> guess "somebody" is you. :)
<jaykul> yeah
<jaykul> well, acronym is mine, and it seems like this should be the simplest way ...
<jaykul> Morydd: here: http://www.huddledmasses.org/2004/06/27/autolinker-by-request-for-wordpress/
<jaykul> I put the squarebrackets regex in for you ;-)
Time: 6:25pm CDT June 27, 2004
</flashback>
I think that less than an hour and a half from suggestion to implementation of an idea is pretty darn good. This is made possible by a couple of things... Open Source Software and a very active and tight community. Because the software is open source, the users not only can make adjustments, but are encouraged to. Because of the closeness of the community around WP, getting help with ideas is amazingly easy. This benefits WordPress, because rather than a small team of developers trying to prioritze between functions and features, you have many people who build on the code, and the developers can focus on making the core product better and then incorporating the best features that others contribute, thereby helping the product become better, faster. But it also benefits everyone who works on WP because the users can get experience building functions and the like, and honing their programming abilities, as well as making the product work the way they want. The response to "I wish it did this..." is not "wait and see" it's "make it happen!"
Thanks [Joel Bennett] and thanks [WordPress]!
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