For those of you who aren’t named Chad, or aren’t otherwise technologically inclined, I’ll try to put the previous post into layman’s terms. I think this is probably about half of our audience. For the other half (Nikkiana, Mike, Chad, etc), feel free to skip this post. 🙂

When Becky and I write blog entries, we use a third-party program called Movable Type. We log in to Movable Type through a web interface, which allows us to write entries, delete entries, and otherwise manage our blog. Most of the time, Movable Type works very well for what we want it to do.

However, there are occasionally times when we would like Movable Type to do more than what it is normally capable of doing. For example, we frequently post photos from our online photo gallery within our blog entries. With Movable Type as it currently is, we have to do most of the work ourselves, by finding the photo we want, making a link to it, making some code that will show the thumbnail sized image, etc. However, I was able to locate a “plugin” that we added to Movable Type. With this plugin (called “gallery-link”), we just have to type in a few short words to tell the blog exactly which photo it should use, and how it should look in the entry. This saves a lot of time and hassle on our part, and it also helps to ensure that every time we include a photo from our gallery, it looks and acts more or less the same.

Up until this point, we’ve been using plugins that other people have written. Now, however, I’ve taken the time to learn how to create my own plugins. Thus far, I’ve only written one plugin. This plugin allows Becky and I to use some fancy shorthand when writing entries, and makes it easier for us to do things like create links, draw boxes around quoted text, center photos, and more. Any time that I think of something else that I’d like our blog to be able to do, I can either add it to the plugin we already have, or create a whole new plugin, if necessary. At this point, the plugin wouldn’t be useful for anyone outside of our website, as it uses style and layout features that are only present on our site. In the future, however, I may think up some feature that would benefit everyone who uses Movable Type, and at that point, I can write a plugin and make it available to the Movable Type community as a whole. Exciting!

Thanks for reading along this far, and I hope this explains what exactly I was talking about in my previous post. 🙂