Prowl, Growl, and WordPress Plugins

I’m working on a WordPress plugin, my first one. The goal is to integrate Prowl notifications into WordPress. If you aren’t familiar with Prowl, it’s a fantastic utility for sending Growl notifications as push messages to your iPhone.

That’s great, if you want to send messages from your Mac over to your iPhone. I use it on my headless media server to give me information about what it’s up to, such as finished downloads, trouble with services it’s running, etc. Better yet though, is that the developer released Prowl API, so that any internet connected service can send messages to your iPhone if it has your API key. PHP scripts, Linux servers, whatever. Fantastic possibilities.

So I decided to write a WordPress plugin that interfaces with it. Why? I could see someone being interested in it. If not, it’s great practice. What’s better, is that I got it running in a day. Big thanks to WordPress’s developer docs.

It’s actually up and running on my blog now, I’m making this post to test out a couple of features. It’s incomplete, has little error checking, and the configuration is terribly ugly, but it’s a start. Hopefully everyone’ll see this up on the WordPress Extend site in a week or so.

If there’s an idea you have for the plugin, please let me know! So far it only does the following:

• Notification on new comments/trackbacks
• Notification on new posts/pages

Obviously this isn’t much, but it’s pretty neat to get the notifications right on your phone!