Today our own Mike Doss released a plugin for WordPress which should prove useful for developers and content managers hoping to display documents inline on their WordPress site. After 4 hours on wordpress.org, Mike’s plugin has seen more than 200 downloads…and counting. Congrats to Mike. We think it’s pretty sweet.
Now for a bit about the plugin, in Mike’s own words…
What is Crocodoc:
Crocodoc is a service that allows you to upload, markup, and share documents online. Through a simple API, Crocodoc will convert a .pdf, .doc, .ppt or image into html and, with the use of an iframe, you can embed this html into your site. The ability to view these popular doc types as real content on a site (as opposed to providing a download link) greatly lowers the friction between user and content— and keeps users on a site longer.
Why I Built It:
Recently, A WordPress custom theme we created here at MediaHive required this type of functionality. Implementing the Crocodoc API into a WordPress site presented a few challenges (i.e. Hijacking the WordPress media Uploader, and managing document shortIDs/uuIDs). To save future WordPress developers the trouble, I have taken the code base from the original project and updated, optimized, tested, and reworked it into a proper WordPress Plugin.
What It Does:
The plugin will create a new meta input box on the edit/add post form of each post type you want to attach documents to. Standard Page and Post types, as well as custom post types are supported. The new input box allows for the inclusion of a document that will be uploaded to your media library, and then sent to Crocodoc for conversion. Adding the ShortCode ‘[crocodoc]‘ anywhere in your post content will include the document, displayed in the crocodoc provided viewer, at that spot in your content.
The plugin currently supports the inclusion of a single public document per post. If I have time, in the future I will update to allow multiple documents per post, and eventually work in including private documents. If you are a developer and would like to implement these features, or contribute in any other way, visit the project on GitHub (link below).
Authors, Download the plugin from the official WordPress Plugin Directory: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/crocodoc
Developers, contribute to the code base on github: https://github.com/MikesNameIsMike/WordPress-Plugin-Crocodoc