Thanks for throwing out your request for WordPress plugin ideas. I have had a plugin idea for a long time that I have been waiting to find a plugin developer to help me with it. If you are interested, we should discuss a business model for it.

I want a plugin that helps me create link list posts. In my ideal world, this plugin would allow me to do the following:

• use a bookmarklet to capture useful links
• compiles those links into an aggregated list of HTML links
• once the HTML is created you can copy and paste it into a WordPress post

What do you think? I think this would help a ton of bloggers. If it is possible to automatically create the post in WordPress even better.

Note: Michael can provide the email address if needed

Different posts widget with images.

Right now I’m using some custom coding to add post images to my related posts plugin. It search for images in this order: 1) featured image, 2) first image in the post, 3) default image.

Would be neat if this could be made available with other post lists, like:

• recent posts
• popular posts (based on views, comments, etc)
• other posts in this category
• etc.

I’m combining all of this with TimThumb to fix scaling problems. If you’re inter­ested I can fwd you what I have already.

Comment link

I think a plugin that many sites would actually PAY for is something for custom posts and taxonomies like Chris Coyier has at http://digwp.com/2010/10/dynamic-archives/ for blog posts.

For example, in a movie database, show me all the MOVIE (custom post type) instances where the DIRECTOR taxonomy includes Scorcese and the ACTOR taxonomy includes DeNiro.

And an AJAX preview of how many instances to expect (ie “DeNiro (12)”) would be nice, too.

I realize the challenge here is making it flexible for the variety of installs but I suspect it could be done.

I have been trying to find a WordPress plugin to create a simple timetable but there is nothing out there that does a simple thing: A timetable with drop down fields to pick and choose who works at the certain day-time combination! I have looked for something like this for over two weeks and tried out lots and lots of plugins but so far nothing!

Please if you can help me out with this.

• In detail Administrator may add
• time slots eg. (09:30 – 17:00)
• personel

These will be shown to the editor as drop down fields in a table that has Mon – Sun and under each day two drop down fields, one with the personel and one with the time slots. The editor then picks for the whole week who works at what time slot and publishes to a page in the WordPress site.

If you would like me to send you more info please contact me! I really hope you can help me with this!

Thanks in advance
George Panagopoulos

Note: Michael will provide email address if needed

Comment link

An event/location map plugin.

There are event plugins that will show events in a list until they expire. Event Espresso, others.

There are map plugins for locations. Store Locator is one, but it is buggy and no longer supported. One nice things is when you hover over the map mark­ers, you get a tooltip popup that can contain an image and information.

I would like to see an Event Locator plugin. Events will show up on the map with an html tooltip popup until they expire. A Google Earth looking map would be nice.

Ideally this should be compatible with Genesis and will work with multisite installs. Each subsite should be able to put their event information on the main map.

Comment link

It’s been a while since I have looked to see if a plugin like this exists. I found 1 that got close to it, but it was super clunky…

Having the ability on ay post, or page I guess, to be able to upload as many images as possible in the same fashion you would set a featured image. This way you get full access to the thumbnail sizes it generates.

So imagine just one of many scenarios, a portfolio post on some kind of project where you want to show off a bunch of pictures related to this project. You upload as many as you want and then in the theme’s code you are able to loop through images and do what you will with the raw image paths. This would allow the images to be used in almost any scenario. Slider, simple unordered list, etc.

Although the given scenario above would really only be useful for someone comfortable with theme dev. I suppose it could have some sort shortcode with some default markup resulting in an UL.

But anyways, I always thought this would be handy and have wanted to look into what it would take to create it myself, but who am I kidding, the time is just never there

Good luck, Michael!

Comment link

Hey, I learned about your post from WPCandy. I think WordPress needs a lot of help with its built-in commenting system. It needs a default commenting sys­tem that’s, at least, as sophisticated as Disqus and the other ones. I did write a little about that topic here http://winkpress.com/articles/wordpress-comments-system-sucks/ . This also is a very major undertaking, I think, but many great projects were built by people who were trying to learn…

@shawn, what’s a fluid/adaptive slider? Do you have an example of fully fluid template sites?

Comment link

One thing that I have not found anywhere is a ‘fluid/adaptive’ slider that works on sites like twenty-eleven.

If you build a fully fluid template then everything must be % based with no fixed images/videos etc. (Anything fixed will break fluid column layouts)

Every single slider on the market requires a fixed width to be set in order to function.

I did manage to build one myself that works pretty well, but it is very basic. I am guessing that as more and more people start to use fluid themes with css3 media queries, that the demand for fluid sliders will only increase.

*Warning*

This is NOT an easy project and it requires pretty decent math and js skills to pull off.

Comment link

It would be great to have a S3 storage plugin and download manager. There are a ton of them out there but mostly broken. I have a large online gaming site and would love to offer files to download (patches, maps, etc..) but there is no good solution. This could be adapted to many verticals and I would be happy to chat with you about it further if interested.

Comment link

What misses from WordPress is a booking system for Hotels. AT the moment, many people setup WordPress sites for Hotels, and they all use Gravity forms to produce a simple but elegant form for Booking. There is nothing that can Work for WordPress.

Comment link

I had a plugin developed last January to solve an issue requested often by our clients…how to hide the widget titles on the frontend, but still see them on the backend?

There are a few ways to do this, but because there is no widget title filter (as of yet) we opted to hide the widget title using CSS based on a class. The prob­lem is that different themes write different classes for widget titles.

So, in essence, our plugin only works for some people.

Our plan was to have this fixed and run through an array of all possible classes, but have not had the ability to hire it out.

I would be very appreciative if you had a look at our plugin description and code and considered this as an inclusion in your call for plugins.

Below are some relevant links, and please feel free to contact me directly at the email on this comment or through our site.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hide-widget-title/

http://wpmodder.com/hide-widget-titles-wordpress-plugin-1147.html

Comment link

Here’s a few ideas for you:

1.) Page-specific meta boxes

WordPress would be more user-friendly as a CMS if meta boxes only showed up on the pages where they were relevant. I use More Fields to generate cus­tom meta boxes / fields but it lacks this feature. It only needs to be simple, e.g. comma delimit page IDs for where this meta box should appear.

2.) Cross-linked posts

Imagine you have created a custom post type called “Adverts” or “Support panels” where you define a set of items. You then need to be able to define which pages these items appear on (ideally using checkboxes).

I’ve yet to find a plugin which dynamically generates a list of options e.g. when you add a new post, it will update the meta box to include this as an extra checkbox option.

Basically the idea is to assign relationships between posts. Could also be use­ful for things like “related links” — so when on the page editor you can select 3 pages which relate to the one you’re on and then display links at the bot­tom of the page content accordingly.

All it would need to do would be to return an array of page IDs with a function like and it’d be easy to do a multitude of things!

Comment link

How about a plugin for image cropping. Let’s say you have defined a few picture sizes to use on your site 100×100, 250×250 and 350×200 (or whatever). When you upload a bigger picture, WordPress creates all these automatically but it uses the centre of the images, so often faces are cut off.

What I would like after I upload, is to be presented with a “cropping-tool” for all the different sizes so I can decide what part of the picture is kept.

Thanks!

Comment link

Hi Michael. One piece of functionality that I’ve been needing and haven’t found a great solution for is the ability to limit the amount of posts (including custom post types) a user can publish, based on their wordpress user role (including custom roless). This would be great for a membership site or direc­tory listing where businesses can only add one post about their company.

I’ve found two, bainternet limit posts and another one by spaw, but they both do not seem to work in a multisite environment.

Comment link

The text editor is the bane of WP. I use TinyMCE Advanced plugin, but not all themes support importing the CSS. It would be great to have a text editor that looks exactly like the site CSS. Or, at least one that has a default serif font in 12 or 14pt, like most sites use.

I also like Eric’s suggestion for a better AS3 interface. I have a member site with tons of vid tuts I’m about to launch.

Comment link

I think a Advance Cat­e­gory Search Plu­gin would be nice for those who wants to cre­ate an advance search for their sites. My idea is the plu­gin let you select the posts that have all cat­e­gories cho­sen, using drop-down list and allow­ing mul­ti­ple drop­down. Let me know if you like the idea for more details.

Comment link

I would love to see my sug­ges­tion for “dis­trib­uted con­ver­sa­tions” be real­ized in the shape of a plu­gin. I’ve made a detailed pro­posal at the bbPress.org forum:

http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/brainstorm-distributed-branched-conversations-for-blog-posts

Comment link

I developed a crm plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/crm/

However, I ran out of time and money to really move this on. I have a ton of ideas to advance it’s usage and wonder whether you would be interested in working with me on it.

Thanks, Rich

Comment link

This is for sites with fluid widths or vis­i­tors with slow connections.

How about a plu­gin that detects the browser width and serves appro­pri­ate sized images. Not scaled CSS but dif­fer­ent res­o­lu­tion images. The dif­fer­ent sized images, small medium, large, etc could be gen­er­ated by word­press using fea­tured image thumb­nails. Word­Press can already make those on the fly. Rather than spec­i­fy­ing an image size when writ­ing a post the writ­terr could choose the option “best fit” and the most appro­pri­ate scaled image would be shown in the browser. This way small screens get small images and large screens get crisp hi res­o­lu­tion ones.

This could be an awe­some band­width saver for folks with lots of pictures.

Comment link

Hi Michael. Many thanks for this initiative. Super!

One thing I’m hoping for is a lean and effective plugin that enables people to export posts or pages to some or all of Microsoft Word, Open Office and Google Docs. The following features would be awesome:

(1) the plugin would support full styling (e.g., nested ordered lists, the CSS for which would carry through to the exported document)

(2) the exported files would be capable of being protected and not being available to search engines

(3) the admin could indicate in the backend whether he/she wishes to auto-create a table of contents in the exported doc by reference to H1/H2/H3 headings in the post or page to be exported

(4) the admin could also indicate whether page numbers should be automati­cally added to the exported doc

(5) the admin could also specify the font that should be applied to the exported doc

A good deal of this capability already exists in the Universal Post Manager plu­gin, but development of it appears to have ceased, its support of Open Office is patchy, it doesn’t support export to Google Docs and items (3) and (4) are not supported.

I’d make a donation if a plugin matching the above features were developed.

Sorry, I forgot a feature for the suggestion above. The plugin would also enable the admin to select which categories of posts are available for export as docs and would have an option to turn doc export on or off for specific pages.

All the best. Richard

Comment link

Hello,

I’ll be short:

A simple crm/helpdesk/bookings plugin where customers can give their details. ask a question and even pay (for a booking or other service). Each customer will have access to his own page with his details (that could change) and a list of questions/replies and payments history.

Comment link

How about a “simple” sidebar plugin that allows one to display their Pandora account and what is currently playing?

Comment link

What a GREAT idea. I would LOVE it if you would consider making a plugin for this program (http://www.ajaxavailabilitycalendar.com). There is already a bro­ken version of this available but the designer abandoned it and would like to see this work. Here is a link to the broken plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/resource-booking-and-availability-calendar/). Thanks.

Comment link

Hi Michael,

What an awesome and benevolent idea on your part. I’d love to see a plugin (or series of plugins) that lets people earn and exchange virtual credits on a WordPress and/or Buddypress site.

Just bookmarked your blog and whatever you choose to develop, I hope you keep us up to date on progress. Thanks.

Comment link

Hi Michael!

I have an idea (I don’t know if it can be done with a plugin). I haven’t found a plugin to manage custom music charts, or a simply way to present/embed/… a custom link (with a shortcode?)to a song from, for example, iTunes, 7 digi­tal, last.fm… If that plugin can get the song info (cover, title, album, author) can be the best for music bloggers!

Great initiative! Cheers!

Comment link

One of many ideas I have would be to create a personal address book for each user, that might be useful for an intranet situation, such as, i.e., development of document templates that the users could send to their clients where the templates will be calling those fields from the address book.

Comment link

If it’s not too late, I would like to suggest “comparison plugin” idea is simple: admin can set up “comparable” custom fields for each category (post templates maybe) then there will be button on each post “ADD TO COMPARE”, that will allow visitor to add post to the sidebar “Comparison list” and then click on that block “compare” button to compare two posts side-by-side, with the values entered in the custom fields.

Comment link

Hi Michael,

We’re a non-profit arts festival and need an online application process that works with our site. The requirements are already fully spec’d and go beyond just setting up a form using Gravity Forms. There is judging, approvals, artist placement, etc that takes place in the admin. This may be more than a plugin can handle but I thought I’d post the initiative in case it peaks your interest.

Best, Brian

Comment link

I would love a plugin for freelance translators.

It would allow a visitor to upload a file (doc/docx/pdf/rtf) and get a quick quote based on word count.

Then, it proceeds to PayPal checkout.

Translator (me) starts the job.

NOTE: There are many great plugins like Formidable Forms which allow to upload files, but they do not count characters in a doc file.

(followind previous post) something like http://www.click2translate.com/quote/quick_quote.asp