In some ways it’s considered “bad” to go too far into a niche market, but lately I’ve begun to explore a pretty small market with custom plugins (while working on my major plugin projects).

GeoTheme is a new theme based on the GeoPlaces theme. GeoTheme was spawned when the purchases of the original theme became seriously disillusioned with the theme they bought. Lack of support, no updates etc drove them to basically make their own by branching the original.

My first plugin for this theme is the GT-Dashboard. It’s pretty simple and offers stats specific to your installation of GeoTheme. You can tell at a glance how many places & events you have, and how many reviews have been posted or are pending. I am planning to add some more reporting including financial information. It’s currently for sale over at ThemeTailors.com for just $5, including all future updates.

Next up, I’m working on a “deals” plugin – mostly re-purposing the Special Offers in GeoTheme, but likely expanding outside of this as well. There seems to be a high demand, so I need to get that done quickly.

My most ambitious plugin to date was supposed to be a few hours, but turned into over a month of part time coding!

RosterPress is a WordPress plugin to help manage talent/model/sport agent websites and more.

Featuring custom talent profiles, an appointment calendar and notifications, RosterPress lets anyone who manages people quickly and easily build a website presence.

Fully customizable profiles let you display physical characteristics for models, actors & similar talent, or simply use the personal contact section for internal use.

The appointment calendar is a simple and slick drag-and-drop system letting you move appointments around with easy, see who’s attached and any other details with a simple click.

Hook all that up to email and optional SMS notifications, and RosterPress really is a business-in-a-box.

The plugin is currently in beta trials with a limited number of copies available for testing. Check it out over at RosterPress.com

As I mentioned in my last post, Ralph helped me out with the Drafts Scheduler plugin. He helped find a bug and get it fixed, which was just awesome. In return, Ralph asked if I’d take a look at building another plugin for him.

His website at DrHouseMusic.com is all about House music and the people on the site link and embed from music sites all over the web. Apparently LetsMix.com is a popular one, but there was no plugin available to make it easy to embed their codes. Sure, LetsMix give out a nice embed code, but you have to do a bit of work. Ralph wanted something simpler for his users.

So, out of that was born the Let’s Mix Shortcode plugin. It was a fun project, that took about 8 hours over the course about a week. Due to Ralph being in Holland and me in Vancouver, we were on opposite time zones, which slowed things down.

In the end, the plugin turned out really really well, and I learned a few things along the way. Please check it out if you’re a music fan needing to embed into WordPress.

It’s been a long time since I updated here, and I need to get back to it.

Drafts Scheduler seems popular with people who use it, and it’s been updated to version 1.5 – however there is a glitch in the WordPress.org repository that doesn’t show the accurate last modified date. It should be April 2011, not January.

The latest version fixes a bug where Drafts Scheduler would post all of your content on saving, not scheduling them.

Thanks to Ralph for finding and suggesting the fix for the bug, and everyone else for believing in the plugin.

Today I released version 1.3 of my WordPress plugin, Drafts Scheduler. I had initially numbered it 1.2 and added an Undo feature that was noted as missing by BlueFur in his review. Seemed like a good idea. I had noted that there was no undo feature in the notes and of course it caused people some issues.

So in v1.2, I added the ability to undo the most recent set of scheduled posts. If any of those posts were already published, the plugin doesn’t reset their status. It was simple. I’d started out making harder than it needed to be, but after ignoring it for a week, I found the solution.

In v1.3, I added 2 new features to Drafts Scheduler, both suggested by users who sent feedback.

1. Check for the existence of drafts before showing the options.
2. Schedule an exact number of posts per day in “Surprise Me” mode.

I also moved the menu option from the TOOLS area up into the POSTS area where it makes more sense.

Anyway, I hope these features work for everyone and I look forward to more feedback.