This year my wife and I have both resolved to return to our healthy dietary and exercise plan of 2009 in hopes to lose weight and feel great. We both use the Weight Watchers® plan. This plan was easy to use and there were a lot of tools we could use to track our meals.

Of great use to us was a body planner that my wife purchased for both of us. The planner allowed us to log meals, activities and exercise. Using this in conjunction with the Weight Watchers® tools (calculators and slide charts), we were able to log our meals and activities with an easy way of monitoring if we were ‘taking in’ more then we were ‘working off’.

November of 2011 Weight Watchers changed their calculations and if we want to both follow the new plan we need to purchase new tools. Me being the curmudgeony ole miser that I am, I didn’t really feel it was necessary to purchase all new tools for both of us, so I decided to let my wife spend the money and I would do something even better. Create a new WordPress plug-in.

So here it is folks. WordPress Plus Points. This plug-in will allow you to log your meals and let you know how many Plus Points you use in relationship to your targeted daily plus points.

In order for this plan to be successful, you still need to go to your Weight Watchers® meetings and use your Weight Watchers® tools. This is just something to assist you in logging your food in a WordPress medium that you might be more familiar with.

You can download the WordPress Plus Points plug-in from the WordPress repository by searching for WordPress Plus Points.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pluspoints/

Plus Points Setup:
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDkt_kaqU0o

Plus Points short-code use:
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmcFFV4RXLc

Please check out the FAQ before you ask for support.

Thanks to some helpful critics and tips from users, we have taken our very first plugin and retooled it to be more flexible and easier to implement into your posts and pages.

If you used our previous plugin (Contestant Rating WordPress Plugin), you will be happy to learn that this new plugin is a great replacement.

1. Use shortcode to display your  ratings. We have incorporated the use of shortcode into the plugin so you are no longer required to edit your template.
   Because it was our first plugin, we did not have the vision to incorporate this in the first iterations. We have done our homework and thanks to the help of other great WordPress users, we have created methods to display the Five Star Rating plugin, ‘Best of the Month’ and ‘Best of the Moment’ using a simple shortcode.
2. You set the cookie.
   We did two bad things with the cookie in the first plugin. First we hardcoded it and second we set the expiration for one year in the future. Of course this worked for us, but we realize now that you might have other uses for the plugin. Therefore we have added the ability for you to set your own cookie expiration for as little as 1 minute to 12 hour to 365 days (or more if you like).
3. Make it your own.
   We originally ported over an existing WordPress plugin and that plugin had more then one look. Unfortunately we did not have the vision to plan for using more then one look. Well not anymore! We have added the ability to theme this plugin as you see fit (more instructions on how to do this will follow). Currently there are two themes, but we have added the flexibility into the plugin to allow you to theme it as you like. It is as simple as adding an attribute to your short code…. like this:

   [five-star-rating star_type="abuse"]

4. Help us keep improving.
   If you run into an issue, would like to request a feature or just want to tell us what a great plugin this is, be sure to post a note to us. Of course if you run into an issue, please don’t just say ‘It doesn’t work!’ or ‘This plugin sucks’ as 9 times out of 10 the plugin is working fine and as we intended, but the plugin is not being implemented correctly. We like criticism, but please make it constructive.

Here is the plugin in action. Rate this post!

Here are some stats for the month.

We have more work to do as far as documentation and such, but this was just so exciting, we had to get it out now. More will follow in the future.

Download the latest version now from wordpress.org

Installation option number one:
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQD-3Gwy2og

Installation option number two:
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBGhxegPm_M

This plugin is no longer being developed.

This is our first wordpress plugin and although we did not write this from scratch (we ported over a previous plugin that only worked in FireFox), we did improve upon a previous product and made it our own.

The plugin requires jQuery and if it is not included, it should load it for you. The most recent version is 0.4.

Download contestant-rating ver. 0.4[25 KB zip]

The original upload had the wrong /js/ files in it, so have updated the download here.