Just for fun, I’ve been porting some of my Jekyll plugins to WordPress, and two of them have turned into what I think are really useful plugins.

I’m not switching from Jekyll to WordPress, I’ve just been enjoying the challenge of recreating these tools as WordPress extensions. It’s somewhat funny because the Jekyll plugins were originally created from WordPress plugins I’d built, and they developed over time. So this is kind of a round trip.

BT Downloads

Project page

A plugin for managing downloadables and dropping download cards into posts. You get a custom post type for each download (file URL, version, description, info link, icon, changelog), upload buttons for the file and icon right on the edit screen, and an editable HTML card template with Mustache-style conditionals ({{#description}}...{{/description}}) plus custom CSS with a live preview.

Insert them via a TinyMCE button in the classic editor or a Download block in the block editor. Pick from a dropdown and the shortcode (or block) is inserted for you. On the frontend you get a styled card: title, download link, description, dates, and optional donate/info links. There’s also a WP-CLI command to import from CSV (the way I handle downloads in Jekyll): wp btdl import_downloads --file=/path/to/downloads.csv . Full details, more screenshots, and the shortcode reference are on the BT Downloads project page.

BT Keyboard Shortcuts

Project page

This one is for writing keyboard shortcuts in posts without hand-coding symbols. I’ve created a few variations of this over time: for this blog, for Marked and Bunch documentation, and probably others. A shortcode [kbd] renders things like ⌥+⇧+⌘+A in the order Apple recommends, with options for symbol vs text (e.g. “Command-Shift-P”), a + separator, and Mac vs Windows naming.

In the block or classic editor, use the formatting menu and choose ⌘ Insert keyboard shortcut to open a dialog: check modifiers (Cmd/Opt/Shift/Ctrl/Fn), type the key, and insert the shortcode. Under Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts you can tweak display (symbols vs text, + separator, key symbols) and add custom CSS for the .btkbd keycaps, with a live preview. Examples: [kbd cmd shift p] → ⇧+⌘+P, [kbd$@P] → ⇧+⌘+P. More syntax and options are on the BT Keyboard Shortcuts project page.

Repo and requirements

Both require WordPress 5.8+ and PHP 7.4+, and are GPLv2 or later. The source for these and any future WordPress plugins from me is my wordpress-plugins repo on GitHub. Grab the code there or follow the install steps on each project page.