I hadn’t written my first WordPress plugin, so I decided this would be a perfect opportunity. You can see it working below this post (and every other post on the site) – where you will find social bookmarking links for only those sites that we’ve seen in your browser history.

I’m still waiting for my submission to be accepted at WordPress.org, but if you simply cannot wait to get a copy for yourself, leave me a comment and I’ll send you the tarball.

Oh, and a big thank-you to the makers of Sociable – I borrowed liberally from their plugin for this one.

If any of you are interested in collaborating to make this a little less ugly, let me know!

• In a room of around 50 people, more than 3 had written their own plugins
• More than 5 were pro-bloggers
• Over half had customized their themes
• More than 10 wrote their OWN themes from scratch
• NO one agreed on the most important WordPress Plugin

This last one surprised me – I had expected a quick concensus on, perhaps the Ultimate SEO plugin, or maybe one of the social bookmarking ones. In fact, people didn’t even agree on the best stats tracking service. Obviously included:

• Google Analytics
• WordPress Stats
• Performancing
• Feedburner
• MyBlogLog (not exactly pure stats)

After the conference, I started working on distilling my many, varied experiences into a few coherent blog posts. Following my (long-ago) background in journalism, I looked around for a quick outside edit before I posted anything – and discovered, to my dismay, that you can’t share draft posts. What?

What followed was a quick IM exchange with Lloyd Budd, the rockstar “Community Guy” at Automattic, and an old friend of mine from the Netscape 8 days. He quickly confirmed that draft posts can’t be shared, and suggested I simply email the content of the post to a few friends. Arg.

All of which serves as preamble for yesterday’s message from Lloyd:

10:04:27 PM Lloyd Budd: I remember you looking for a plugin like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shareadraft/ recently
10:06:07 PM JustJosh: AWESOME
10:06:11 PM JustJosh: perfect, thank you very much
10:06:22 PM Lloyd Budd: my pleasure

This is now my new favorite plugin. It simply lets you share (for a defined period of time, like 2 hours) the draft view of a new post with, well, anyone.

In the spirit of our NorthernVoice talk, what’s YOUR favorite WordPress plugin – and why?

This bug had turned up about 6 months ago, in a new release of WordPress, and Flock hasn’t revisited the wordpress support in quite some time.

Luckily, it was a simple two line fix.

This post is, in fact, a test of the fix. If we’re happy, it should be tagged:

wordpress
Matt Mullenweg
lloyd budd
flock
bug fixin

How did we do?