I was really surprised when I was contacted recently by somebody who might want to use my theater productions plugin. I’m not 100% certain it’s going to do what he wants, but he’s willing to try. But that means that I need to actually document the silly thing. So I’ve spent this weekend writing up a first draft of a page on how to install and use my plugin.
Go ahead and give it a read if you’d like. If that doesn’t scare you away from using it, nothing will.
I’ve made a lot of progress on my plugin. All of the content can be created and edited directly within the plugin. Site administrators can add and edit seasons, venues, and plays. They even have the ability to update cast lists, production and audition dates, and upload publicity photos. The only things left to do were to enable the ability to delete some of those items when needed, and then make the code more “generic” so it would work on another server, instead of only on my specific server.
Or so I thought.
Unfortunately, a user doing a perfectly reasonable thing pointed out a big hole. Somebody posted a comment on a page for a specific show. Unfortunately, the way WordPress manages comments, those comments would appear on EVERY show’s page. So now I have to see if I can figure out a way to tie comments to specific shows. Until then, I’ve disabled comments on the show page, as I think it would cause more confusion than it’s worth.
I also want to see if I can tie into the WordPress search system, so that, when somebody does a search, it will check all of the plays in the database, and not just the “normal” posts.
A programmer’s work is never done. *sigh*
Time for another updated on my WordPress theater productions plugin.
I’ve now got it to the point where it can work with either PostgreSQL (which the original application was coded with) OR the MySQL database that runs the WordPress installation. I happen to prefer PostgreSQL, which is of course why I wrote the original app that way in the first place. However, running against MySQL has the distinct advantage of being much easier for a non-technical person to set up on a new blog.
I now have the ability to switch back and forth between the two database schemas, as well as being able to export the data, and then import it. That way I can move all of the data between the databases.
It’s not ready for prime time yet. I still don’t have any method inside the plugin for managing the data. That comes next. Once that’s done, I’ll have a plugin that I think might be of use to other theaters.
I’ve been using WordPress for handling my (dormant) blog for a while now. I’ve also been hosting the website for Baytown Little Theater, but the content was managed using just HTML. I had a database of productions that was visible on the site, but it was all handled with custom PHP code and. PostgreSQL.
Well, now that I’m moving away, I figured I’d better make it easier for somebody else to manage the content. So the site is now being managed by WordPress. But that doesn’t help with the productions database. So I’ve started working on my first plugin.
The plugin allows content authors to create pages and/or posts which reference the data in the productions database. There’s even logic to allow for looping, displaying things like cast lists and productions in a season.
Right now the plugin still uses the PostgreSQL database, but I have plans for converting it over to MySQL so that it can be shares with the WP database. I also need to migrate the management portion, so that the contents of the database can be updated from within the WP admin interface.
As soon as the code is in a state that I think somebody other than me could use it, I’ll publish it here. At that point, any theater that uses WordPress would be able to use the plugin to manage their own seasons on their site. It also has an integration with the Tickets to the city ticketing system
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