Updates on my recent development projects - Robert DeVore

Recent project updates

Since late last year I’ve been hard at work on various development projects. While I’ve spent time blogging about each of them here, I haven’t updated the posts with new details about each of the projects.

This post is aiming to do that.

WP Dispensary

This has been my biggest focus the last couple of months. What started in November of last year has quickly turned into a pet project with the potential of growing into a full fledged business.

Since I first blogged about WP Dispensary here, I’ve released two new versions (1.2 and 1.3 respectively).

I’ve also open sourced the Dispensary Display theme that was built and originally for sale through the WP Dispensary website. Updates are coming to this theme in the next week or two, enhancing it further.

Clean Blog

The very first piece of open source code I’ve released, the Clean Blog WordPress theme is something I’m very proud of and have continued to update since it’s release in August of last year.

There’s a lot of new enhancements built in since the original release, including an option to darken the header or change the background color default, which you can see in the Github repository.

I have a couple more updates to push and I’ll blog about everything that’s been updated here as soon as it’s all pushed live.

miniQuiz

One of the things I told myself this year was that I would learn Angular.js and the miniQuiz was my first attempt at working with it.

It was originally a fork of the QuizApp, built by Saurabh Odhyan. I started by just adding in a tweet results option for the end of the quiz, but then decided to take it further.

The miniQuiz Angular app got put into a bootstrap template and styled to give it a more polished look. I also took the questions and changed them to some hip hop questions.

Future plans are building a way to easily recreate the quizzes, possibly done through a CMS of some sort. Still under development, so I couldn’t say for sure when this will happen.

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed working with Angular and I’ve got ideas for a few other app ideas and will be diving into iPhone and Android app development soon.

Slackedd

I use Easy Digital Downloads a lot, and since everybody seems to be using Slack for communication with teams and business contacts, I knew that this plugin could help.

Slackedd is a free WordPress plugin you can download from the Github repository (no WordPress repo, read why here).

It will send a notification through your Slack channel of choice whenever your EDD powered store makes a sale.

Simple, but effective.

Leafly Reviews

My first official WordPress plugin accepted into the repository was Leafly Reviews. I was happy when I first released it since it was the first time I worked with an API. I was proud of the work I did for the plugin.

Then Leafly decided that they were closing down their API, which made the plugin useless. I’ve left it in the repository and Github is still hosting it, in case Leafly renews their API and I can get the plugin back in working order again.

This happened right after I built the Leafly Specials plugin. So now they’re both not usable. I guess it works for the best, because I’ve now released the Dispensary Coupons plugin on Github, and will be getting the final version ready for release in the official WordPress plugin repository.

Dispensary Coupons is a lightweight plugin that lets you add and edit coupons directly through your WordPress dashboard, much like you do blog posts. It comes with the ability to display your coupons with a widget or shortcode.

What development projects are next?

The next thing I’ll be spending my time working on is the blog at WP Dispensary. I’ve been releasing free marijuana stock photography recently, and have plans on writing content for dispensary owners to build better marketing strategies, better websites, and better businesses as a whole.

I also am working on the official launch of the Devio Digital website. The focus has changed a bit from what I originally had it set up for (showcasing my open source projects). There’s an example of what’s to come on Twitter (@DevioDigital).

Other than that, everything is still full steams ahead into Spring.

I said all of that, to say this – I hope you’re making the most of your time and building things that excite you.

We all deserve to be happy. Do things that put a smile on your face. Life is too short for bullshit.

Keep in touch

I’m social on Twitter and Instagram. I’m also actively coding on Github.

Comments

3 responses to “Recent project updates”

  1. Rockie Avatar
    Rockie

    Thank you so much for Clean Blog theme. It’s a life saver! I have been looking for a simple blog theme for so long. I found this clean blog on startbootstrap, but also faced hardtime converting it into a wordpress theme!!! Very glad to have found this!
    – One quick question, how/where to add the “share this” with the social links at the end of the post? Is it a plug-in?

    1. Robert DeVore Avatar

      You’re welcome, I’m glad you like it! Those icons are added from the Jetpack plugin. You can always choose a different social sharing plugin if you don’t like the ones Jetpack offers.

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