My second plugin release within a week? What is happening?

Draft Links is a fork of one of the features from one of my other plugins – Draft List. Let me explain why.

When I wrote Draft List, many years ago, it was to provide a way to display unreleased post information in widgets and post content – a great way to say “hey, these articles are coming soon”. It was all about drafts, hence the name.

I also added some shortcuts to the admin menu to quickly access your drafts, along with some nice highlighting of many drafts you had.

Eventually, though, the plugin moves on as it became apparent that other posts, such as scheduled posts, would also benefit from being listed as “coming soon”. Indeed, I need to add more, such as pending posts.

And 2 things happened with the menu changes that were part of this plugin…

1. They became popular, and sometimes without the need for the other part of the plugin. For example, I’ve found having the drafts separately accessible incredibly useful on this site. But I’m not interested in displaying “coming soon” details. I’ve ended up installing Draft List just for the menu capability.
2. It’s out of step with the rest of the plugin. I only provide links to drafts but the plugin is now focused towards all non-published content.

So, after the work on Draft Concluder last week, during which I found better ways (than I had in Draft List) to access draft content, I created Draft Links – it’s just the menu changes, but with a much improved code base, which is more performant than previously.

On this site, I’ve already installed this and removed Draft List.

What does Draft Links do?

The plugin is relatively simple. It adds, for both posts and pages, sub-menus that link directly to your drafts.

You’ll get an “All Drafts” link and, if not all drafts are yours, you’ll get a separate “My Drafts” link as well. And, next to each, within a bubble, a count of how many there are.

Here’s a screenshot of the menu taken from my test site…

So, there are 18 drafts in all, 16 of which belong to me and 2 to other users on the site.

And, next…

Next up, I’ll be working on Draft List – it will get new functionality, the menu changes will be removed and it’s going to get a new name (as it does so much more than just drafts now).