Sympathy for the Devil WordPress Plugin
Humor, Telecom, WordPress Stuff
If you blog and use WordPress, you might be familiar with plugins, which are handy little software modules that can greatly enhance using WordPress. I’m using about 15 plugins here at jeffschult.com; anything you want to do, there’s usually a plugin for it. Akismet blocks comment spam. Subscribe2 allows people to have profiles and set subscription notifications. Obsocialbookmarker lets people bookmark and share posts. Global Translator … well, it does what you’d think, as well as it can be done at the moment.
There is a cheery little plugin called “Hello Dolly” and you, dear reader, cannot see what it does, because all it does is display random lyrics from Louis Armstrong’s classic song in the top right of my blog administration screens. Some people complain about this plugin and call it “useless.” These people lack joie de vivre (let’s see what Global Translator does with that …) “Hello Dolly” is, in fact, the first-ever plugin written for WordPress. So it was kind of a test, presumably.
But even people with joie de vivre, such as myself, can get a little tired of seeing random snatches of “Hello Dolly” lyrics at the top of their screens, right? I was strangely reluctant to disable the plugin though … I have this thing about using software if it is at my disposal. Finally, it occurred to me that I would be happier if I had a choice of song lyrics.
So I rewrote the “Hello Dolly” plugin using the lyrics from “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones. It was pretty simple to do, and for now, I am the only one in the world, probably, whose WordPress admin screen says, at the top right, “Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name …”
My little hack of “Hello Dolly” is absolutely no more useful than the original. But what the hell. Maybe I’m in need of … some restraint. (woo woo, woo woo.)
Maybe I’ll make it available for download if anyone wants it.
Update: I did that little thing. Here’s the page at WordPress:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sympathy-for-the-devil/
I hope Mick and Keith will leave me alone now. Fifty four downloads as of May 2, woohoo …
jss @ April 9, 2008
Oye man keria preguntarte como isiste para cambiar las palabras ya q lo e intentado y nada me da un error y se desactiva porfa dime es q tengo varios colaboradores en mi blog y pues seria bueno ponerle fraces para alentarlos.
Unfortunately, I don’t speak Spanish … so I am going by the Google translation of your comment.
To change the words … you just have to edit the words in the hello.php file (for the Hello Dolly plugin) or in sympathy.php (for my Rolling Stones version.)
Use a text editor. You can see where the song lyrics are. Replace them with whatever you like.
In order to make your version into a new plugin, you have to change the name of the file and have it called correctly, which is very nearly trivial.