Day: December 26, 2010

The WordPress blog & website software hosts on their own site, a large collection of 3rd-party Plugin titles for the program. As of late 2010, there are over 15,000.

They call the page for this repository, WordPress Extend-Plugins.

WordPress does some vetting of these plugins; provides a standardized format for organizing information about plugins, and creates a ‘marketplace’ in which folks can ‘shop’ for plugins.

Individuals, organizations and businesses all produce plugins, for a wide variety of reasons. With WordPress involved in the promotion & delivery of plugins, the ‘reasons’ for offering plugins can’t stray too far into territory that you don’t want to inadvertently find yourself in. To have WordPress ‘ride herd’ on the plugin scene, is A Pretty Good Thing.

“Short Syntax Highlighter” is a Plugin for the Plugin website software.

It is intended for nicely-displaying examples of computer-code, within your posts & pages.

There are more than a few such ‘highlighters’ around (they typically color the different ‘syntax’ elements differently, thus ‘highlighting’ them). Why do we see ‘yet another one’? How might this one be of interest?

Starting with somewhat secondary factors, first: this plugin appears to have been produced by the core WordPress shop itself. That makes it important & something to know about (for anybody interested in code-highlighting or plugins to do that, within WordPress), period.

My own interest or hope; the reason I am installing yet-another-highlighter, is that this one might provide relief from some of the drawbacks that arise with other Highlighters. That it will offer a simpler way of doing the job, which will then become standardized (because WordPress itself is behind it).

Here’s the standard blurb on it, from the official WordPress Plugin Repository: