It’s been a while since the last post. So, what happened?

I’ve been working on some of my side projects, two which I am going to share in this post.
On the other hand, I broke myself a leg, that’s where the title comes from…

Well, back to the side projects:

I wrote two WordPress plugins, both inspired by actual questions from the Buffer Slack Community:

Slack Publish

Due to the recent huge channel removal and reordering in the community, a lot of people added thoughts on how to further reduce the channel list down to a number of useful and meaningful channels. This also meant renaming the “#-general” channel to the “#announcements” channel (thus removing the ability for non-team owners to post to the channel) and using a separate channel “#community-watercooler” for the general chit-chat.

The discussed channel which led to the plugin was the “#buffer-blog” channel. Slack does not allow threaded conversations within channels. BUT there is a chance to create a threaded conversation: Images. You can comment on images and also see every comment made below an image in a threaded manner.

So, if you run a WordPress blog and want to publish your post to Slack, why not let it be done automatically? Most themes add the so called meta information to any given website of the blog, so posting a link within Slack shows automatically the title, an image and the excerpt of the article. The downside is, that it behaves like a regular post, which will not be capable of threaded comments.

This is where I started: I wrote a plugin, which uploads the post thumbnail to Slack and adds the required information (title, excerpt and link) to the image, allowing the users to have a look at the full article, but also being able to comment from within Slack and interact with other users on that article.

I’m glad to present my first Slack app: Slack Publish.

Bootstrap iFrames

The second plugin I wrote is the Bootstrap iFrames plugin, which adds two buttons to the Text editor. Those buttons let you create responsive embeds for a Twitter Bootstrap based theme by pasting in the embed code.
Feel free to download it here: Bootstrap iFrames 1.0

That’s it for now. I’m crawling back onto the sofa after I sat upright for writing this post.