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I’ve got the idea for my first WordPress plugin; so far I have the idea, the name and a semi-working demo (Alpha version 0.1 - See “Consuming” here). I don’t know if anyone reading this is a mentalist coder, if anyone’s out there I need some help!

The plan is; you see a film (maybe you’re watching something right now) and you want to tell people, or you want to take note, you want to rate it or provoke discussion. Maybe you just want to remember you saw it, when you wake up the name will be lost. Sure, you could write up a lengthy post on your weblog, or… you could ‘consumer.us’ it. Shit, that name needs work.

So you’re watching a film, its 3AM… it a really great film - you’ll never get round to remebering the name, or buying it - but you want to tell someone - and damn it iChat is empty - well you load up your favorite Mozilla based browser (or hit the dashboard on OS X) and a del.icio.us style entry form appears. It’s pre-configured with your blog details and Amazon Affiliate ID. All you have to do is write in the Movie Name, your rating and maybe a one sentance review (which will appear optionaly to the reader in AJAX form, oh I love Web 2.0)… click “Submit” and voila; its on your WordPress Sidebar. (Demo: on my Homepage: Consuming) I’ve done the demo with K2’s Asides, although I started with a del.icio.us plugin and at one point even thought I’d stumbled on the fully formed idea; Addictions, sadly this is a pretty limited version 1.x of what it could be.

So, where to go from here; Asides is okay. There must be a way to write a plugin that will write and read to its own columns on the blog’s db. Using del.icio.us is possible - but there’s not a tonne I can do with the default entry points “URL” “Details” “Tags”. Oh, I also want to allow comments, from readers on the reviews or ratings (possible with asides). Maybe I should just build a frontend for asides. Then again, If I use Asides I want to hide that catagory (Asides works off a certain category). You can see why if you click “Consuming” from the Category links (nice Category Visability Plugin. Anyway here’s what I want to do:

“Consumer.us” / some other name - is a plugin for wordpress that allows blog authors to display ratings of recently viewed films (maybe books, music and whatever-else denoted by little icons) in their WordPress Sidebar. Film’s are added through Dashboard Widget or del.icio.us style popup window, ratings and short reviews can be accessed by the visitor using AJAX and this is all integrated with Amazon Affiliates and Wishlists through the options panel in WordPress. Visitors can subscribe to the Consumer.us RSS feeds, people can view tag clouds and anyone can scan through a huge library to see whats hot through the del.icio.us styled homepage.

⌊ CC - Callum Alden.