WordPress is increasingly widely used by Liberal Democrats, whether it is to run websites or blogs. One of WordPress’s strengths is the huge range of plugins available. The party has made a small number of Liberal Democrat specific plugins available too (see www.libdems.org.uk/tools), however there is scope for many more.
Hence this official party competition:
- The competition will run until 29 February.
- You can submit as many WordPress plugins as you wish.
- They must all be original, and not have been published previously.
- A prize of £200 will be paid to the plugin which, in the views of the judges, is most helpful for someone running a Liberal Democrat website or blog. This might be adding a Liberal Democrat specific feature (e.g. integration with one of the party’s online tools) or it might be providing a more general feature that is also of use to Liberal Democrats. Easy of use and quality of documentation will be taken into consideration.
- To submit a plugin to the competition email with the subject line “Plugin competition”.
- All plugins will be made available as open source software, and you must ensure that any plugin submitted does not contain any material which would prohibit this.
- The competition is open to anyone except federal party employees or their families.
- Any queries about the competition should be sent to
- The judges will be Mark Pack and Will Howells and their decision will be final.
If you are stuck for ideas on plugins to produce, here are some examples that have cropped up in people’s wish lists – though you don’t have to submit something from this list:
- A plugin to run online STV polls.
- A plugin to allow easy insertion of petitions from the party’s online petition tool (http://ourcampaign.org.uk) into a website or blog
- A plugin similar to KBLinker but which pulls from a central list of MPs’ (and others) names and web addresses so that people don’t have to maintain their own list.
10 Comments
You don’t mention if you require copyright assignment and you need to go into more detail about open source.
Does it need to be GPL? Can it not be GPL?
Why don’t we put our campaigns on the far more visible No. 10 Downing Street petition site?
Matthew @1: good points, thanks. The answers are: GPL or fully compatible with GPL and the author retains copyright but must grant everyone else irrevocable permission to use, copy and amend the plugin.
Looks like I’m officially persuaded to have my first stab at writing a plugin/widget.
Excellent news Steve!
First time I’ve played with the API too. Interesting.
I’ve knocked up a couple which I’ve sent in.
I know there are gazillions of programmers in the Lib Dems – let’s wow our rivals by getting loads of entries.
Would a Facebook widget work – or would it have to integrate with your WP installation to count?
Yes, that would be fine as a widget is a form of plugin.
Sorry Mark, I had meant to ask if a Facebook app would work.
Whatever happened to this?