So you may have heard about me talk about Flock, the new kid on the block. One of it’s neat features is that you can easily use your Flickr photos when you’re writing a post to your blog. I thought to myself, I’d like to be able to do that too, except I don’t really want to always have to use Flock to do that. And since WordPress provides a nice plugin architecture, maybe I can write a plugin to mimic this feature in Flock. And I’d like to search the photos too, instead of just listing out photos for one user.

So over the course of the next few hours, I sat down and wrote a plugin for WordPress to do just that. Here’s my second ever WordPress plugin, the Flickr Post Bar plugin. Just like Flock’s Flickr Top Bar, this plugin displays a scrollable and searchable row of photos to your WordPress edit screen. Unlike Flock, which just allows you to retrieve photos by username, this plugin allows you to search for photos either by username or tag, or any combination of both. Once you have found a photo you want to use, just click on it, and the proper HTML snippet will appear in your post. Now with Flock, you can drag and drop photos into your post, but since WordPress doesn’t have a wysiwyg editor installed by default, I didn’t spend the time to make that happen. And also drag-and-drop actions seems like a lotta JavaScript kung-fu I don’t really want to think about, especially if it’s not for work.

Click for a screen shot:

If you are a WordPress user, check it out and let me know what you think! >