Koolkit started as a learning experience for me in writing WordPress Plugins. I started off a bit rough with a few simple applications. Then while at a meetup I met some people with a real need. This became the Kool Preview option. That was the first real plugin I created. It is really just a cool function to add to your theme and it is very self contained.

The second add on feature was the Kool Weather function. That one was a lot more complicated. It took me a while to learn YQL, REST, JSON and then I hit gaps in my PHP knowledge! There is no learning without pain, so said a professor at my college and he was right.

So now Koolkit is ready for your own installation. Here is what you do. Download this whole thing into a directory called Koolkit and then zip it. Go to your WordPress installation and add a new plugin. Select upload and find the zip on your disk. There isn’t any real configuration needed. It will just work.

To customize this is easy. The CSS file has several clearly labeled classes. You can make Koolkit output fit your needs. You can get really clever!

To add the preview just open up your index.php file in your theme folder and add the following function where you want the preview to show up:

<?php kool_preview_boxes(); ?>

It is that easy.

For weather, right now we have a short code you can use in your posts.

[KoolWeather location='your location']

Location can be something like ‘Nashville, TN’ — try different locations. Caen, France works. Addis Abeba, Ethiopia does too. If a location doesn’t work,  look it up in Wikipedia to see if there are alternate variations it might be known as and try those.

An update will allow you to switch from the default being Fahrenheit to Celsius. I am pretty sure Yahoo! weather doesn’t handle Kelvin yet.

There is more to come. I want there to be 5 Kools in Koolkit #1 so stay tuned.