When we originally started Eager, our vision was to make it easy for non-technical website owners to install tools onto their websites. It turns out it’s hard to get non-technical people to install a technical tool to allow them to be non-technical.

But we can use the tech we developed to make it possible to build pretty great Wordpress plugins without touching PHP [1]. The plugins that we end up with not only fulfill the goal of being installable, they include some interesting features not found in many Wordpress plugins:

Live Preview

A live preview of the Drift plugin.

The configuration process of most Wordpress plugins amounts to an unstyled HTML form with a save button. We are able to give you a live preview of the plugin on the user’s actual website where they can see how their settings map to changes live and choose where elements should appear on the page.

Registration and OAuth

Most plugins require you to create an account on the service you’re signing up for, then copy an API key of some sort into your Wordpress settings. We were able to make it possible to OAuth into your account, or register a new account, from inside the plugin.

How?!

It’s pretty simple, you make an Eager app, which usually just amounts to adding an install.json file to the client-side JavaScript which powers your embed. That’s it, you have a Wordpress Plugin ready to be listed on wordpress.org/plugins and enjoyed by millions of Wordpress sites, enjoy!

You can read more docs (including example apps) here: Eager Docs

[1] No disrespect to PHP programmers, we wrote a good bit of it to make this possible.