Need WordPress Plugin Created
Let me try to explain what we want the plugin to do.
The principle is the same as a Twitter widget. You go to twitter.com (or use another utility) to update your Twitter status. You place a widget on your WordPress site that will pull in your Twitter updates. It will display the last 4 updates, or whatever you want it to display (there are many Twitter widgets that do this). The widget pulls in the updates for your Twitter account by requiring you to provide the user name and password for that Twitter account (in other words, you can’t just pull in animals from any Twitter account you want—you have to have the login).
So, we want to do basically the same thing, except not with Twitter.
This will be for the site www.petfinder.com. Many animal shelters around the country are members of Petfinder.com and they post animals they have for adoption on this site. Petfinder provides a really good API, and I think you could get the information you need from this in order to make the plugin work. Right now they have a tool where you can generate and export custom HTML to display pets on your web site (I have an example of this at http://www.okhumane.org/adopt-a-pet/pets-for-adoption). You can pull in dogs, cats, or both.
Here are the characteristics I want for the Plugin.
Does not require a login—all the person has to enter is the Petfinder.com shelter ID to display the pets. (this means that anyone can display a list of pets on their wordpress site if they only know the shelter ID). Each shelter is given an ID by Petfinder that is the state of the shelter, plus a number. For example, my shelter ID is OK202.
Can be used as a sidebar widget, as well as a shortcode to be embedded in a page
The size of the sidebar widget can be customized (width & height)
Allows the webmaster to select what is displayed in the widget: how many animals are displayed (from 1 to 10), whether they want dogs, cats, or both
It will not allow the webmaster to customize the “look” of the widget. The colors will be consistent and “branded” with the petfinder.com colors (I will provide you with a mockup of how it needs to look)
Each animal in petfinder is given a unique ID number as well, which is a sequence of numbers. For example, this dog http://www.petfinder.com/petnote/displaypet.cgi?petid=15218478 has the ID of 15218478. So we know two pieces of information about every animal in this database: its shelter ID, and its unique animal ID.
It needs to have three display options for what pets to display:
1) show randomly selected animals (within the specified shelter ID)
2) allow the webmaster to specify which animals to display, by inputting the animals’ unique animal IDs.
3) display the most recently added animals
The widget needs to display the photo and name of the animal (both are included in the petfinder.com profile for that animal)
When a visitor to the web site clicks on an animal in the widget, he is taken to that animal’s petfinder page (for example, http://www.petfinder.com/petnote/displaypet.cgi?petid=15218478).
Well, that is a lot of information, but hopefully it will help you be able to determine if it’s something you want to try. Let me know if you have any other questions. You can find out all about Petfinder.com and their API by going here: http://www.petfinder.com/developers/.