Rainmaker, a local startup, was announcing a month-long API Challenge for their new web service.

The challenge: Build Something Cool! (along with a chance to win some fabulous prizes)

But what’s the API all about? Basically, you provide an email address to their API, and Rainmaker returns a rich set of contact information.

I took a quick browse of their contest page, saw the API and some examples, and immediately started thinking about something to build.

Today, I’m officially releasing my contest app:
The RainmakerMoxie Interactive WordPress Plugin.

How it works:
1) Enter an email address to lookup.
2) Available contact info for that email address appears in the sidebar: photo, contact information, interests, social profiles and links, tweets, and Plancast plans.

Highlights:
• Configurable to show 1-20 most recent tweets.
• Configurable to show 1-20 most recent Plancast plans.
• Setup is internationalized for Chinese, German, Italian, and Spanish.
• Mashup API’s include SendGrid, Twitter, and Plancast.

The Plugin can be downloaded from the WordPress hosted Plugin page.

The Plugin source code is located at the WordPress hosted SVN repository.

Faithfully submitted, Neil Simon

The plugin, written in PHP, has several well-documented examples of helpful WordPress plugin features.

See how the readme.txt maps to the hosted plugin pages and the 5 hosted screenshots.

The main code module dandyid-services.php has examples of:

• Creating a sidebar widget.
• Processing returned XML that is PHP4 and PHP5 compatible.
• Storing and retrieving wp-database options in an array.
• Embedding the plugin name and version-number into a <div> tag that appears on all blog pages that render the plugin. (useful for debugging — many versions of the plugin can be out there in the wild)
• Localization for international language support.
• Creating an options page for admin plugin configuration, including HTML that renders radio buttons and checkboxes.
• Caching the DandyID API results — on a busy blog, the plugin only calls the DandyID API once every 2 hours.
• A plugin activation hook that creates initialized, defaulted wp-database options.
• A plugin deactivation hook that cleanly removes the plugin wp-database options.

The WordPress maintained repository contains all of the DandyID Services Plugin files for the current release. WordPress automatically packages the plugin files as a zipfile for downloading.