I have decided it is time to dabble in a little PHP coding. Or get a little deeper than I have gone before. At any rate, I’ve decided it’s time for me to produce a WordPress plugin. To accomplish this feat, I must learn a bit of PHP syntax, the idiosyncrasies of the WordPress API, and a little bit of the Facebook API. It’s time to see how beneficial my Java programming class really was.

The Plan

The current plan is to write a simple plugin for WordPress that will connect to Facebook and retrieve your status for display on your WordPress blog. Why? Well, the Twitter service has been in the buzz recently, and a WordPress plugin was released to allow you to display your Twitter status on your blog. However, Twitter does (as far as I can tell) nothing more than allow you to post a little status blurb – just like Facebook. However, Facebook has a vast network and many more features… so why create and use another service for only one small thing? Instead, I could just import my Facebook status into my blog and be done with it.

Maybe others will see the same. My new plugin will be called Facebook Status for WordPress and will be named wp-facebook-status. As my PHP programming skills get better, and assuming that I find the time, I may write more plugins to implement further Facebook features (and possibly release an integrated suite that allows you to import all sorts of information from Facebook). For now, I’m just going to get my toes wet.

Please, if you have any comments, suggestions, encouragements, critiques, or other information, leave a comment!