Last month, WordPress developer John Blackbourn made a semi-tongue-in-cheek suggestion for a plugin.

WordPress plugin idea: Weekly email reminder about your draft posts to guilt trip you into finishing them. Impossible to unsubscribe or deactivate the plugin until there are no drafts left.

— John Blackbourn (@johnbillion) October 9, 2020

However much he may or may not have wanted it, I decided to make it a reality. Not just some of his suggestion, but all of it. And then some.

Named Draft Concluder (a pun on “draft excluder”), it’s now available for download.

What does it do?

As John asked, it will send an email to every user who has outstanding drafts. He also asked for it to be weekly but I’ve also added the option for it to be daily as well (and you can choose which day too), along with the time that it will run.

Possibly the most controversial request was for it not to be possible to disable the plugin – well, I’ve added it, although it doesn’t do it by default.

So, if you want a regular reminder of all those draft posts, this is the plugin for you.

Creating the plugin

It’s taken me longer than I would have liked – I don’t spend a huge amount of (spare) time on plugin development and I’ve had numerous niggly, but annoyingly difficult to debug, issues during its creation (indeed, I wish I’d kept a development diary, as it would have made for an interesting read).

But, I’ve learnt a lot – the plugin makes use of various things in WordPress that I have no or only some experience of. I’ve got so much more knowledge, I’m already planning on following this up by revisiting one of my existing plugins and re-writing it.

I’ve also had feedback from a number of sources along the way – some of which I was able to integrate into this first release and others will be in the next major version.

You can follow development, along with the issues log over in the land of Github.

Wait, which version?

At the time of publishing this, the plugin is already at version 1.0.1. I actually pushed this to WordPress.org last night and within minutes someone found it, downloaded it and found an issue (and one that I can’t recreate, which is frustrating – none-the-less, the bug has been fixed, thanks to the user tracking down the cause).

Update: A Post Status mention

Well, I wasn’t expecting this, but I got a mention in the latest Post Status newsletter (issue 421, sent 16th November).

I would like to correct, however, this line…

David says his work on this plugin led him so deep into WordPress, he’s probably the only person to know some of the things he learned.

They seem to be working (based on the links in article) from this post, but I’ve not stated this at all. Indeed, what I’ve learnt is probably pretty bread-and-butter stuff for more people, but just not something I’ve come across myself before.

Never-the-less, all of this has lead to a flurry of downloads and issues (thankfully nothing critical) raised, including some great suggestions for improvements. As a result, I’ll be jumping back onto development of this plugin sooner than I intended – hopefully 1.1 will be out in the coming weeks.

Update: A WP Weekly mention too

Edition 21 of WP Weekly made mention of the plugin too…

Geeky Reminders… for your draft posts that need completion (sometime in future). Guess what? David Artiss has created a plugin for this exact thing. Draft Concluder plugin sends daily or weekly reminders for draft posts. Good Idea!