WP Tavern Industry Night Interview

So I had the honor of being featured on Episode #2 of the new weekly podcast “Industry Night” released by wptavern. I had recently released a plugin in to the WordPress repository called Expand+Collapse Funk. Basically the plugin creates a TinyMCE button on the post or page edit screen that, when pressed, asks the user for their input and then drops all the necessary code in to the text editor. The code creates one of those accordion (or a.k.a expand/collapse functionality) style links that contain hidden content. When the user clicks the link, the content below it slides down and is revealed.

This sort of functionality is widely used on the web, and is quite often seen in many WordPress templates and themes. I wanted to bring this sort of functionality to every user regardless of what theme they have implemented. There are other plugins out there that do this sort of thing, but they all drop in a short code and are not not the most user friendly when it comes time to adding content to the the hidden area.

Another thing that Expand+Collapse Funk does that the others do not, is gives the user the ability to easily add images or YouTube videos to the hidden content area. Sure, the other plugins allow this in some round-about way, but with my plugin its all done with the use of an easy to use interface.

The Interview

Shortly after releasing the plugin to the world I received an email through the contact form on this site. Marcus Couch, one of the contributors to wptavern.com, had emailed me to let me know that he really like the functionality that I had included in the plugin. Along with that, he believed it to be very progressive in the sense that it brings functionality generally found in templates to the fingertips of the user for use in many different ways.

The interview went quite well as Marcus and I discussed some of the features of the plugin, how I came about creating it and eventually moving on to the future of WordPress plugins as a whole. Some pretty interesting things were brought up and discussed, so go ahead and read the interview and listen along below!

Thanks to Marcus Couch for taking the time to interview me about some of the work I do, and to give my plugins a bit of exposure. Having others take note of the work that I do is enough of a reason to continue developing for the repository. Money and fame is nice, but knowing that you helped someone solve a problem by releasing a plugin free of charge is the ultimate honor.

And thanks for everyone over at wptavern.com for all of the amazing articles they release for free on a daily basis.