Two Plugin Ideas for the Christian Blogging Community

I’ve had an idea in mind for a Word­Press plu­gin for quite some time, and I’ve tried a few times to code it myself — or mod­ify exist­ing plu­g­ins to get some of the func­tion­al­ity that I want. Today, the idea came back to me in an expanded form.

I believe that the plu­gin would be a huge ben­e­fit to any­one run­ning a Bible study, the­ol­ogy, or church site, and I’m hop­ing that some­one out there read­ing either has the skills or knows some­one who has the skills to accom­plish this for the ben­e­fit of the com­mu­nity. I’m will­ing to help in what­ever way I can, but remem­ber that I’m post­ing this because, well, I’ve tried and failed.

The plu­gin is a com­bi­na­tion of two ideas, and I sup­pose they could be devel­oped separately.

Idea 1: BibleRef Markup

The first seems like the sim­plest: auto­matic BibleRef micro­for­mat­ting.

Let me say up front that there are plu­g­ins sim­i­lar to what I want already out there. The Holy Scrip­tur­izer rewrites Bible ref­er­ences to be links to online Bibles; these links con­tain the desired microformat.

And Ref­Tag­ger uses JavaScript to not only markup verses (dang near per­fectly, I might add), but also dis­play very nice verse popups.

What I would like is a server-side ver­sion of RefTagger’s markup. The Scrip­tur­izer has this, to an extent, but it is nowhere nearly as flex­i­ble as RefTagger’s parser.

I don’t want verse pop­ups or links of any kind added. All I’m look­ing for is a way for verses to be micro­for­mat­ted auto­mat­i­cally. This seems easy at first — the hard part to get started is putting together a bul­let­proof reg­u­lar expres­sion to catch all pos­si­ble verse ref­er­ences, like Ref­Tag­ger has — but there are impor­tant details to keep in mind: verses should default to being wrapped in cite tags, with the BibleRef markup being added to those tags. If those tags aren’t already present, they should be added. If the verse is within a link, then the BibleRef class should be added to the link.

It should also be pos­si­ble to ignore verses in pre­for­mat­ted blocks, code frag­ments, head­ings, and other select elements.

The rea­sons why I want this are threefold:

First, exter­nal ser­vices would be able to index your posts based on the verses they con­tain, essen­tially cre­at­ing a Web-wide Scrip­ture index.

Sec­ond, other plu­g­ins could be writ­ten (or may already exist) to take advan­tage of the BibleRef markup, such as verse pop­ups, links to online Bibles, and so on.

Third, BibleRef markup is required for the sec­ond part of my idea.

Idea 2: Scrip­ture Index

At the end of many books I own, along­side the stan­dard index, can be found a Scrip­ture index. This index is very basic and con­tains sim­ply a list of verses ref­er­enced in the book, fol­lowed by the page num­bers upon which they appear.

I want some­thing like that for my site. I want to be able to cre­ate a page, des­ig­nate it a Scrip­ture index, and have that page pop­u­lated with a list of Bible verses, each with a sub­list of links to the posts/pages con­tain­ing them.

Gen­er­at­ing the list on the fly would be very server-intensive, so the list needs to be updated when posts are saved/modified/deleted or in the back­ground via Word­Press’ cron ser­vice thing… or a com­bi­na­tion of both.

This idea would seem to require an addi­tional table in the data­base with columns of unique ID, ref­er­ence, and posts. The posts col­umn would be pop­u­lated by a comma delim­ited list of the post/page IDs which con­tain the verse reference.

There may be sim­pler ways of doing it, but that makes the most sense to me at the time.

I truly think that such a plugin(s) would be a huge ben­e­fit to the Chris­t­ian blog­ging com­mu­nity, so I hope that some­one picks up the bur­den of this project. I’ll keep try­ing to come up with some solu­tions on my own, but I’m not promis­ing any­thing. Reg­u­lar expres­sions are my arch-nemeses.