My experience with the plugin (issue & suggestion)

Much much appreciated, your reply, and the attitude it shows. (Hat off & bow 🙂

Let’s cut to the chase, yes, site owners do all kinds of stuff to their sites, sometimes so unexpectable and weird, it’s just hard to answer everyone’s needs but I gotta say, a right direction can always be pointed out with determination and a clear mind… (cut the crap pls… lol)

Alright I’ll list my points from now on:

Preview and excerpts:

I think the plugin should have a default option to just get the feature image and the manual excerpt for a post, this way, the process is straight forward, and everyone knows what to do to work with the plugin. Auto generate thumbnails and excerpts should always be second choice or a fallback when the default option fails. And if for now, this plugin can’t work with shortcoded content, php content, let’s put them on hold and warn people, always always, manually prepare your feature images and excerpts before you put posts in the pool.

Layout:

I’d break the whole thing into let say 3 parts. i) Related posts, ii) Pagination/Load more button and iii) Promotions

“List view wrapped in floating block elements” as default theme, for all kinds of device, all you need to do is to decided the post numbers, thumbnail size, text position and character counts. This way the layout is already responsive and always fitting the parent post width. All other additional choices are just fancy, not even worth their places in the core. (Or you can always put them in premium version 🙂

Turning on off the plugin’s mobile theme section if a user not considering giving the list different thumbnail size and text number, text postion and direction, on smaller screens. That should end the layout’s basic feature. For how to load more related posts (ii), it should be just a replication of the first part (i), So if the first part works, the second part should also work. It can be as simple as an ajax button, or links of tags leading to the archive pages.

The third part is like this (and I’m pretty sure you should add it, no matter how many people against it, and I can sense that you want to do it 🙂 a promotion area. It can be as simple as pulling a number of random posts from the “other taxonomies”, or an extra input box appears on every post edit page for people to put whatever they what there. Kind of works like a second manual excerpt area. But its content only shown with this plugin. And this is where you can do all kinds of magics, connecting to zemanta server, interacting with affiliate sites, showing ads, editors’ choices, newsletter submit, social sharing codes, author card, you name it. Eventually it becomes a signature showing the site is powered by zemanta, without even showing a powered by message.

Cough… enough of bullxxxx from me, these barely qualified suggestions are just what I have to say, in the name of wordpress’s sharing spirit, with my very limited English. If code is poetry, let’s see zemanta’s work become an epic poem. Now let’s all go back to our real jobs and continue to live on our coffee, my best to you.

Ev.

PS. As in debug process, I think the plugin must be able to “fail”, so some plugin specified error messages can show up in the log. Instead of having the safety net to showing a default image, an empty excerpt box, a default list view, a default styling sheet… etc.