Godfrey Chan is a popular name echoing through the technology world right now. Godfrey’s innovative thinking and collaborative efforts with fellow UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology staff bestowed upon him an honourable title – Grand Prize Winner of WordPress Plugin Competition 2009 for his submission of Section Widget 3.0.
When the Creative Juices Began to Flow…
The initial idea to create the widget that brought Godfrey this success came from Novak Rogic, Manager, Web Strategy and IT for the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. The implementation of the idea was done by Godfrey with feedback given by his colleagues Novak, Scott McMillian, Enej Bajgoric, and Michael Ha. Multiple versions eventually lead to the final, award winning plugin aptly named Section Widget 3.0.
WordPress ships with built-in support for side bar widgets [Eg. ‘Latest News’ Box] displaying on the side of the WordPress blog or site. However, as Godfrey recognized, it doesn’t let you select where to show it – it’s an on or off option, you either show it on EVERY page or you don’t show it at all. Godfrey summarizes where this limitation becomes noticeable. “As soon as you [start] using WordPress as a CMS [content management system], this is going to be very limiting. For example, what if you want to show a “Latest News” section on just the homepage? Or, what if you are running a movie review site with WordPress and you want to display a different “Top 10” list for each page? This is doable, but you have to write quite a lot [of] code, and it is quite difficult to manage even if you’re comfortable with writing all [the] code.” Thus, Section Widget 2.0 was born (after an initial internal development version). In a drive to create a simple and user friendly plugin for WordPress users, Godfrey developed a text widget with context selection, meaning a widget that lets you type in HTML and show it on the side bar. This proved successful as one reviewer deemed the plugin as “Widget Logic on steroids!” referring to another plugin that allows you to do the same thing by writing code.
Section Widget: Simplicity Abound!
Godfrey’s dedication and technological savvy didn’t stop at this initial success. In the 3.0 version he submitted for the competition, Godfrey added what he refers to as a “killer feature.” He describes how he integrated this into his competition submission; “[While working on the plug-in] I was tasked to write a replacement for a plugin [at work] that we are using called “Tabbed Widget”. That plugin allows us to group any regular sidebar widget into Tabs. However, we find it quite confusing to use and maintain. After some experimentation, I decided it would be cool to integrate this feature into the Section Widget because we liked the “context selection” feature a lot. So I did exactly that.”
Godfrey’s creation has changed the way users can operate WordPress. He and his colleagues initially thought the most interesting use for the Section Widget is in the context selection portion. But he has found the opposite. “To our surprise, most people are actually more interested in the “creating tabs” part. I guess the reason is that most people are using WordPress as a blogging platform instead of a CMS… we provided a very easy to use interface for an otherwise complicated task.” Despite this, Godfrey believes the biggest potential for the plugin is using it in a CMS context, where you have many different sections which require different information on the sidebar.
This widget is currently being used on UBC’s LEAP webpage and with all the buzz on the blogs, it is sure to be quickly implemented elsewhere.
What the Future Holds
What lies ahead for Godfrey? He explains that he is not currently working on any new plugins. Godfrey plans to write tutorials that teach people to program, designed with beginners in mind. “I’m planning to make it as easy as possible so even someone with completely no programming experience can jump in and have an idea of what this is all about [and appreciate the “fun”]. For example, one of the planned tutorials is to write a lottery program using Excel.”
Whatever the future holds for Godfrey, it will surely incorporate his technological skills and creativity.
You can download Godfrey’s Section Widget here.