Production Polish

It’s amazing the amount of work that can be required to get from something that is perfectly wonderful for internal use to something that’s ready to be distributed to the public. For quite some time, we’ve been using a custom made WordPress plugin to allow us to edit blog posts with EditLive! It’s used on three blogs within Ephox, two blogs on this server and I’m pretty sure Rob’s using it too so it gets quite a workout. It’s stable, feature packed and all-round wonderful.

The only draw back of it was that a different license key is required on different servers and so each server needed a slightly different config file in the plugin. Not too difficult, but annoying when you’ve got improvements that you want to roll out. Tonight I set out to fix that by providing an options page in the admin interface to enter the license and have it stored in the database. Got it working pretty easily and everything was good.

Of course, now that we could do that the plugin was feature complete and basically ready for public distribution should we want to.

Except I should add a simple way to turn on debugging in case people have problems.

And it would be good to fix it so that it loaded the editor when the “Use Visual Editor” setting was checked instead of requiring it to be unchecked (to get rid of TinyMCE which is barbarically hard coded into WordPress).

And things load faster if you specify the config file as text instead of making the editor go and download it in a separate request.

Probably should fix the product branding and generally make things look a bit more professional. Oops, still missed a bit there.

Oh and it doesn’t get the width of the editor quite right (actually that’s still not right…. there we go).

Oh and that change should make it possible to avoid the original editor flashing up before it is replaced… Awesome.

It’s taken me all night – and this was a product that was just a few minor tweaks away from being releasable. I still haven’t got any docs on installing it or using it, not to mention there’s no packaged up version ready for download – you need an account to check it out of Subversion at the moment. This is why XP has the concept of “Done Done”.

UPDATE: If you’re interested in getting your hands on this fabulous WordPress plugin, please drop me a line either in the comments or via email. I’m interested in talking to people about what they’d want in the plugin and determining if there is enough demand for us to release it.