Tuesday 3 November 2026
Some days are about building new things. Others are about getting the things you’ve already built to behave themselves. Tuesday was mostly the latter.
I’ve been working on two quite different parts of Niche Clever: the website itself, particularly the way it displays ongoing development work, and Niche Clever Interactive, the WordPress plugin I’m preparing to send back to the WordPress.org reviewers.
Getting the activity stream working
The activity ticker on the website has been taking rather more attention than I’d originally expected. It’s a fairly simple idea: a rotating selection of recent development activity, with a fuller stream for anyone interested in what’s happening behind the scenes.
Of course, simple ideas have a habit of acquiring complications once you start using them.
There were some display problems to sort out, and I wanted the entries to describe the work properly. Some projects had been lumped together under the wrong headings, and the system needed to accommodate work that crossed more than one project. That’s a fairly common occurrence around here.
The pleasing part is that it’s all working locally. I’ve connected Notes from the Workbench to the activity stream, so new journal entries and other publications appear in the ticker too. I’ve tested the interaction on the local version of the site, and I’m happy with how it works.
It’s a small piece of infrastructure, but one I rather like. The website can give visitors a sense of what’s being built and changed without my having to maintain a separate running commentary. The next job is to copy the changes across to the live site.
Another round with WordPress.org
Meanwhile, Niche Clever Interactive has been going through another round of preparation for submission to WordPress.org.
This has been considerably less entertaining.
The latest Core 1.0.4 candidate has passed its PHP and JavaScript tests, WordPress Plugin Check and clean-install checks. There have also been some refinements to the analytics behaviour, help documentation and administrator translations.
The difficulty isn’t so much getting the plugin to work. It’s making sure that every aspect of it satisfies the requirements of the WordPress.org review process. After the earlier rounds of feedback, I’m taking a fairly belt-and-braces approach.
There’s a temptation, once the tests are passing, to package everything up and send it off. I’m resisting that for the moment. Another careful inspection seems preferable to another round of avoidable correspondence.
The less glamorous end of development
So, not exactly a day of great revelations. The website work reached a point where I’m satisfied with the local implementation, and the plugin moved another step towards resubmission.
There’s a fair amount of this kind of work in software development. The interesting ideas tend to get the attention, but there’s also the business of making everything fit together, checking that it works and preparing it for other people to use.
Tuesday was very much one of those days.
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