With my WordPress theme (a bastardized version of Kubrick’s), there is this small area on the top of the sidebar that is empty in several situations. When you are viewing an archive, that area is filled with a message outlining what you are currently viewing. However, when you are on common pages like the main page or looking at a single post, nothing is there but blank space.

I started looking around for something to put in there, and finally settled on using the Deep Thoughts plugin Jen outlined in her post “jappler’s wordpress”. (a great guide to some cool plugins)

I installed and activated the plugin, and called it in the sidebar.php code using an else statement, so that in any situation where there was nothing in that space, there would now be a JH quote. Everything worked great. One problem, I am too impatient to wait 24 hours for a new quote. So I modified the code a little and created my first WordPress plugin.

The Random Thoughts plugin is essentially the same code as the Deep Thoughts Plugin by Valerie Holifield. The difference is, instead of checking the day of the year and displaying the corresponding deep thought, it just displays a random one.

To use the random thoughts plugin…

1.) Download the randomthoughts.zip file

2.) Extract randomthoughts.php and put it in your plugins directory

3.) Activate the plugin in your site admin

4.) Call the function from any page using ‘< ?php randomthoughts(); ?>‘

Enjoy!