Friday, April 19, 2024

A Cruft Free, Super Simple, WordPress Link Rendering Plugin

For this year's Omer Learning Project, I've launched a fresh WordPress instance using Lightsail. I'm utilizing the Lingonberry WordPress theme, as it's super lightweight and should work well for the site's post-centric content.

I'm using the free version of the Ultimate CSV Importer plugin to import content I plan to share every day of the Omer. This content is provided by generous members of our shul via a Google Form.

This has all been working out well: individuals can quickly contribute content, and I can easily schedule it for publication. Where things broke down, however, is that a number of the contributions included links, images, and YouTube videos. By default, these show up as plain text in the final post. For example, consider this test post:

What I wanted is for WordPress to automatically detect and render that URL as an image.

I'm sure there are a variety of plugins that do this sort of thing. The problem is that these plugins often do way more, introducing a level of complexity and noise into the site that I'm trying to avoid. In this case, it was easier to code my own plugin than to find just the right one to use. The plugin I created is named: bs-simple-formatting-fixes.

This tiny, poorly named plugin detects links in your posts and turns them into rendered content. It includes support for images, YouTube videos, and basic links. It means that the post above is automatically turned into:

You're welcome to grab this plugin and customize it to your own needs.

Chag semeach and happy counting!

No comments:

Post a Comment