Wordpress Stickers & Badges Story

WordPress Stickers & Badges Story

Its an interesting story that how i got engaged in WP10 party hosting. When i recall that moment i can’t believe that i was just visiting wordpress.org to view my plugin’s stats. I saw a red label on top of the wordpress website. It was exciting to register via meetup.com.

Although many meetups were held in Lahore Pakistan before this too but for most of us it was the first time to gather everyone. In few hours we got 60+ RSVP’s and Lahore Pakistan was appearing in top cities of the World with no. of RSVP’s.
Few of them were there to get WP stickers and badges but WP management couldn’t send us the envelop because we joined the race a little late. Many people joined RSVP race a couple of months ago in 2013. Finally we gathered in a local McDonald with a WP10 cake. It was a butter cake undoubtedly and we couldn’t finish it, huh…; still it was a great effort by my colleagues. We designed and created a WP10 symbol with an empty card box. It was obviously a surprise to all of WordPress lovers who were waiting for us there. But one thing shocked me that everybody was asking for the stickers and badges, lol. Still many friends ask about that envelop which was received by few lucky groups. McDonald’s staff was looking this awesome gathering and were expecting that people will start ordering something and this meeting will end up with a good close but a few guys ordered and rest of them enjoyed gossips and exchanged contacts. Such gatherings were rare in that time, most of the guys were student and internees in their organizations. And the experienced ones were taking time to be frank with each other.

At that time i was new to regular development in WordPress plugins, although i was writing thing blog and had developed 35+ websites on WordPress but still i my interaction with WordPress was like a beginner. Only one plugin was available in WordPress directory “Keep Backup Daily” by me. It was a new world for me to code for those problems which are common but nobody asked you to code for it and you are providing a solution before problem is reported. Initially i was visiting my plugin many times a day to view the downloads counting but later on couldn’t find time to reply the support queries. Although many queries were responded in time and many features added on demand but it was a fun for me. Later on when i was working on a project and i felt a requirement that every category can have a no. of posts and in that particular category we might will require to sort posts alphabetically. This requirement was not explained by the client but as i have been started thinking like a WordPress solution provider so i sensed it and developed a plugin “Alphabetic Pagination“. Only one thing mismatched here; data was already inserted as a single post instead of multiple posts. Categories were different but in each category there were not a no. of posts to work with my brand new plugin. I spent a no. of hours to make smart logic but in vain. Client was managing it by simply putting “href” with div’s id attribute. And that was easy for him when there is only 1 or 2 lines description for each title. Aaaah… another plugin was about to launch. At that time it was an awesome plugin because i developed it with an alert brain and less code. But i was sure about one thing; that plugin was developed from a developer’s mind perspective. Most of the WordPress users are not developers so they might will not accept it as an easy one. The same thing happened and i got many queries; although i modified many things in it but still its not being understood by majority. Few users expect it to be working everywhere although it works with taxonomies and posts. Many custom made WordPress Themes never bother to follow the WordPress coding standards so they missed main query and sub query concept. This plugin modify the main query and let you to relax about posts alphabetic sorting. My journey towards WordPress plugins and widgets is still going on but it was a good start with proactive problem solving thinking. All of the WordPress lovers wish to be gathered once again to share their achievements with each other and now i have few plugins and widgets to share with them.