One of the projects we’ve been working on (a WordPress site) needed a sidebar widget that looked like a calendar, with each cell being a month showing how many posts were published on that month. Since we couldn’t find a plugin with that functionality, we decided to write our own. After we finished writing the plugin for the project, we realized that it was fairly simple to make it more generic and publish as a WP plugin.

Writing a WordPress plugin is quite simple. There are a few things you need to do to make it a sidebar widget (basically you just have to extend the WP_Widget class and implement a few functions) but nothing too complicated. We also took the opportunity to learn how to use AJAX inside a WP plugin, since we didn’t want to refresh the whole page when changing years in the calendar.

So there you go: we’re publishing our first open source project, a WordPress plugin called Month Calendar. The source is available at GitHub, and the plugin is also published on WordPress Plugin Directory. You read more about it by going to its page.