Insert Callout

When you read a newspaper or magazine, you’ll often see a callout or sidebar nested within the article that addresses a point that’s tangential to the main story.

I’ve always liked this style, and I wanted to use it in my own blog.  When I tried to do this, though, I was floored at how difficult it was to do this well, let alone easily.  I started by hard-coding the callout in my post, of course, but I quickly found that I’d written a lot of custom CSS styles to make the callout work right, and I really didn’t want to have to copy this code by hand into each new post I wrote.

Next step: styles in my CSS file.  While these worked well on my site, I discovered that my posts lost their formatting in a feed reader.  In fact, it turns out that feed readers generally don’t handle stylesheets at all, so it was back to the drawing board.

Thus was born the “Insert Callout” plugin.  This plugin lets you use a simple tag in your page or post, and it renders the callout when your page is displayed.  You can change the styles for the callout block, the title, and the body.  To insert a callout on your page, do something like this:

Download:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/insert-callout/

Roadmap:

This is a brand-new plugin, so it’s got some rough edges.  My intent is to try to improve the plugin over time, but I certainly don’t want to build stuff that nobody is going to use, so if you have feedback for me on features and/or bugs, please let me know.

• (fixed in 1.0.3) Currently, the plugin supports only one callout per page.  Change this to support multiple callouts.
• Improve “how-to” support.  Options range from better documentation to some sort of support right on the page/post editing screen.  (Note:  I added a syntax hint on the editor screen in 1.0.3, but I really don’t consider this to be a huge step forward).
• Make it easier to pick styles.  Maybe some sort of gallery on the settings page so you can pick a style for your callouts rather than having to enter CSS directly.
• What would you like to see in this plugin?