Over the years, I’ve built up quiet the library of “mini” plugins that I use during plugin and theme development. They’ve provided me with a ton of value and I’d like to share them with you. But instead of releasing a ton of small mini plugins geared around the same idea, that is, helping out during plugin and theme development… I figured why not just release one container plugin to house them all. Say hello to Devel.

Devel

Devel is a WordPress plugin made up of “components” (which are the mini plugins) which can be activated or deactivated so you only use what you need. For the 0.1 release, I’ve bundled only one component with devel and that is the Custom Fields Manager.

Custom Fields Manager

The Custom Fields Manager component displays a listing of all custom fields available in your WordPress site. This is handy for when over the years, you’ve used a few dozen custom fields and would like to pin point all the posts that their used in to maybe modify or delete them. Well with the Custom Fields Manager, you can. In addition, you can edit a custom field to update it’s meta_key value, which will update all of it’s instances on your site. This is useful for when you’ve misspelled a custom field in one of your posts, or if a plugin changed which custom field it needs you to use. Finally, with Custom Fields Manager, you can delete individual custom fields or delete them in bulk. And that’s what you can expect from the Custom Fields Manager component. It provides very handy administrative task for managing your custom fields.

The Components API

In addition, there’s a neat components API built in so you can add your own components to the list. I’m not the only developer with a library of useful mini plugins, so devel allows you to bundle your own set. Thanks to Justin Tadlock and his Members plugin which is where I got the components idea from.

Download Devel Now.

P.S. Once I polish up all of my mini plugins, I’ll gradually add them as components to devel. For now, enjoy the CFM.