from the editor of aseidman.com

Yahoo Shortcuts for Wordpress (Beta)

Posted by Ariel Seidman | December 14, 2007

Yesterday my team announced the launch of Yahoo! Shortcuts for Wordpress which we developed with Alex King and the CrowdFavorite team — CrowdFavorite team specializes in Wordress custom development and Alex was one of the early Wordpress developers.      First for some history…  We decided to take Shortcuts to Wordpress…Up until yesterday Shortcuts had found a home (a pretty nice one) in places like Yahoo! Mail, News, etc. but we decided a few months back that this technology needed to move beyond the walls of Yahoo!. Inspired by Luke Wroblewski’s early vision we decided to integrate Shortcuts directly into the authoring environment.   What it does…  As you type it find relevant terms such as locations/places (e.g. University of Texas), companies (Goldman Sachs), and brings you recommended content such as Maps, Flickr images (see the one in the upper left), Finance charts so that you can quickly add some spice to your blog post without the hassle of copy/pasting code.Both the Yahoo! Search Blog and the new Shortcuts home page do a far better job (or so I would like to think) of explaining what the product does far better then I will do here — so have a quick look.   What we learned from developing for Wordpress… 

1. Rich-Text Editor (RTE) Integration
   • Integrating  seamlessly into any RTE is hard.
   • Wordpress, while overall a great blogging platform, its RTE is still a bit flaky which made things that much tougher.
2. Security: 
   • Be very careful not to open any security holes.
3. Cross platform compatible plugin architecture: 
   • While we would get some scale when we do a similar plugin for MovableType — this needs to be a “build once deploy anywhere” where a developer can simply check the blogging platforms they want access to — Wordpress, MovableType, TypePad, Drupal.  
4. Stats
   • Standard way to instrument plugins to capture # of activations, de-activations, etc. — if anybody has found something that does a good job of this let me know.
   • We don’t want to force bloggers to sign-up with us as there is no need to, but it would be nice to see how many people activate the plugin and then whether or not they de-activate it.

Here is some of the coverage via Techmeme.   

No Comments yet »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Search