Idea: Unique Post Designs Made Easy with a WP Plugin

[jackbach]

hi there!

First at all, I know this is not the right place to do it, but since this is my first topic please let me introduce myself in a couple of lines.

I'm Jack Bach, a 19 years old web designer and developer from Barcelona (Spain). Nowadays I'm studying Media Engineering - currently in final exams, ouch! I love 960gs, CodeIgniter and jQuery (yes, I'm a frameworks guy). And of course WordPress.

Sorry for that. Lets go to the topic. For some weeks I've been turning over an idea in my head, a new way to create content in WordPress. Let me explain. Back in the early days, blog posts used to look like plain text. I mean, a title and a lot of text. Those posts were pretty boring to read so most bloggers started to add taglines, images, thumbnails, videos and other media. Thats how most posts look like nowadays, but the new concept of unique post designs have recently came out. Those posts that look like magazine articles.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can find some here.

Most of them use grid based systems for their CSS. So my idea is to develop a plugin that helps bloggers post this kind of posts. The main features I have in mind are:

• Front end editor: the blogger can see while he/she is writing the post, how it is going to look like when published.

• Grid based system: really important because it makes the plugin development easy, as well as this will make the posts cross browser compatibles.

• Custom CSS for each post: every post can have its own css file, that means that the default blog theme can fit each post.

• No need to code: like other html editors that already exists, the user don't need to code since there are style panels with sliders, color pickers and all that fancy stuff.

Some technical stuff I think that would work:

• jQuery and jQuery UI for the editor should work.

• The app would be hosted in my servers, the data would be sent to the user WordPress installation, which would save the data.

And thats it. So please, if you have read all that long text, I'd really appreciate your opinion:

• Does it already exist a plugin that handles it?

• Which target do you think that would be interested in using this plugin? Would you use it?

• Do you think people would pay for it? Would you pay?

• What would you change about what I've told you?

Thank you guys for your time!

[greenshady]

I think there's a plugin; though I'm not sure of its name. What you're referring to is called "art direction," I believe.

As for using a plugin, I wouldn't use it. It takes about 5 lines of code to do this from your theme's functions.php file (plus the custom CSS and/or scripts needed for the post).

The frontend editor would be cool. The only problem I see is that it would need to be theme-specific. Since themes are coded so differently (as far as HTML and CSS are concerned), it'd be impossible to create an editor that worked with all of them. For it to work, you'd need to release a compatible theme/plugin combo.

[jackbach]

Hey! Justin, right? Nice to meet you.

The plugin you shared is cool, but pretty basic. I've designed in photoshop what my idea could look like:

preview_unique.jpg

About the themes issue: I have thought in the plugin+theme combo. But I think that with some work, I could make the grid fit most themes. I mean, knowing in which div the post content is supposed to be, it's easy to know its width and adapt the grid to fit it (number of columns, width of each one, margin between them...).

What do you guys think about the design? (It have to bee improved, but you can see the concept)

Thank You!

[sleary]

The Art Direction plugin was designed for this. Inspired by Jason Santa Maria's blog, I think.