My Post Stats WordPress Dashboard Widget

I’ve been curious about how much I post to my WordPress but all the Statistics plugins I was able to find for WordPress were about visitor stats.

Thus I created the plugin My Post Stats Dashboard Widget.

Dashboard Widget

All the plugin does is to add a new widget to your WordPress Dashboard that shows the months in which you posted something to your WordPress. Here is mine:

A screenshot of the My Post Stats WordPress dashboard widget showing a graph of posts per month and a table with stats like posts per day, most active day etc.

Below, you see a table of stats with posts per day, per week, per month. Most Active stats about which day of the week you post mostly, which hour of the day and what was your year with the most posts. Finally all time stats like your first post and the total posts you made.

Finally, it has a tree view of your posts so that you can rediscover what you posted in a particular year and month.

How to show or hide it

If the widget doesn’t show up automatically, check the Screen Options by clicking on the top right of the wp-admin screen.

You can also move the widget around:

Oh, and if the colors look different in your dashboard this is because it respects the dashboard color scheme you’ve selected in your profile (via the top right menu → Edit Profile):

Get the plugin in the WordPress plugin directory now: My Post Stats Dashboard Widget! If you encounter issues, please visit the Github repostory and report an issue or submit a patch.

Submitting Patches to Github with WordPress Playground

Today, I’d like to talk about a new step I added to the WordPress Playground Step Library that makes it easier to configure WordPress Playground in a way that you can easily submit Pull Requests to the Github repository where the project is hosted.

What is the Step Library? It is a tool that makes it easier to create a so called Blueprint for WordPress Playground that boots WordPress in your browser window according to your needs.

The specific step I introduced is called the githubTheme step. It will run a theme from a Github repository.

Additionally, and this is mostly following guidance from Nick Diego for his own Nautilus theme, by ticking a checkbox, it will configure Playground in a way that you can submit Pull Requests through playground (open this setup in the step library):

Screen Recording

So after creating the blueprint, there are a number of steps to take until you arrive at your PR. To show this better, I created a Screen Recording but below I also extracted some screenshots and commented them. This is the Pull Request created in the video, and here is also the playground link that the step library generated so that you can try it out yourself.

The screencast actually shows how I first missed the right button but then demonstrates that you can also update PRs.

Screenshots from the Recording

Here are some screenshots from the video (omitting my mistake):

First, you connect to your Github Account (I had already done this, so this just proceeds)
In the Site Editor, I can then change the color palette like this
Then I use the Create Block Theme plugin to save the changes to the theme
And press “Save Changes”
Choose to export the Pull Request to Github
And give some details before submitting it to Github
This is now the final Github Pull Request

How does it work?

It is amazing what WordPress Playground can do: it runs WordPress in your browser, so there is a virtual filesystem to which the Create Block Theme can write its file changes. The

Already in November 2023, Adam Zielinski published the GitHub Pull Request submission flow but only recently Nick Diego showed me how practical this is for theme developers. The only downside: it takes quite a lot to configure:

  1. You need a blueprint to run your theme from Github,
  2. Make sure that the Create Block Theme plugin is installed, and finally
  3. Configure a set of URL parameters for Playground to let it know where the PR should go, which directory to export etc.

The Step Library makes this more accessible by automatically setting those query parameters for you. It’s then also easy to add more steps, just try it out, using the above as a basis!

If you want to read a bit more about the Step Library, I recommend reading my previous post on it.

As of now, I wouldn’t call the flow simple: you need to be taught steps on how to submit changes. But when you know them, submitting a PR to a WordPress theme can be done without any server infrastructure! I think this is fascinating!