Why would you need a bespoke plugin?
Sometimes you will have a requirement for your website to include some particular functionality to suit a business requirement. Often there will be WordPress plugins available to extend your WordPress based website in order to provide this functionality. There are some occasions, however, when there is not an existing plugin that will meet your requirements, or the options available in fact provide too much functionality making them overly complicated to use and adding unnecessary ‘bloat’ to your website.
Rapid Web Services can work with you to develop a bespoke WordPress plugin that meets your exact needs. The below are a few examples of bespoke plugins that we have developed for some of our clients.
Automatic PDF Creation
We built a full WordPress website with a bespoke theme and custom fields for a client, enabling the company to keep the site up to date with the latest products and case studies. With the use of the custom fields, the WordPress administration always contains the latest data.
The target market of the website, made up predominantly of architects and specifiers, find it useful to be able to download specification sheets for products as well as printable case study overviews.
To keep all of the PDF specification sheets and case study documents consistent in terms of their style and branding and to use the up to date information that the client enters in the WordPress administration, we created a bespoke plugin for the company that would automatically generate a PDF with the correct branding and the latest data from the custom fields of the WordPress administration area.
Related Case Studies
There are many WordPress ‘related posts’ plugins available, but as they are trying to reach a broad audience, their options tend to be limited and the ways that the related links are displayed constrictive.
One of our clients wanted to display related case study links on product and case study pages, based on their own category criteria and ranking factors, in order to show their customers a selection of related links based on similar products or application areas. They also wished to keep their content looking fresh without the restriction of always showing the latest posts. Rather, they wished to show a selection of three related posts, chosen at random from the posts matching their criteria. We developed a bespoke plugin for the website that fulfilled these exact requirements.
Automatic Redirections
With a large directory style website with hundreds of articles across several categories, our client wanted to move away from a bespoke system to a WordPress system that would make it much quicker and easier for the various content writers to create and categorise new articles for the site.
We migrated all of the content from the existing site into a WordPress structure and created a new design for the site with a bespoke WordPress theme. The directory and url structure of the new site was obviously, however, very different from the previous site, raising the issue of how redirects could be effectively and efficiently implemented.
The solution was a bespoke WordPress plugin that uses a variety of identifiers from article IDs to parts of urls to systematically create automatic page redirects.
Permissions Editor for Ninja Forms
We’ve recently developed an open source plugin for WordPress that is available through the WordPress Plugin Directory. After utilising Ninja Forms on many websites, we were frustrated that access to any of its features are available exclusively to users with an ‘Administrator’ role. Therefore, we developed Permissions Editor for Ninja Forms which enables the various aspects of Ninja Forms to be made available to the different user roles.
