It is 10 years today since I released my first ever WordPress plugin. It’s been a blast, and I’ll probably release more in the future too.

That first plugin was “Ryans Suckerfish WordPress Dropdown Menu”. It was in response to a blog post by Miriam Schwab on her blog the wordpressgarage.com (now wpgarage.com). She wrote about a plugin which added a dropddown menu to your site. I didn’t like the implementation at all as it did not support Internet Explorer version 6 (IE6), one the most popular web browsers at the time. So I implemented a simpler plugin which loaded more quickly and did support IE6 (via the popular Suckerfish JavaScript code).

This plugin later exploded into a huge tangle of code which provided many different features for adding menus to your site. I eventually monetized it through the use of a dropdown menu CSS generator and premium support service, which helped with a little pocket money.

The plugin was poorly named poorly unfortunately, as it had morphed into something far beyond the original implementation, so I created a new plugin called the Mulitilevel Navigation Plugin. This was also a stupid name however, and so that plugin was replaced by the PixoPoint Menu Plugin (pixopoint.com was the name of this blog originally).

Eventually WordPress core announced the introduction of the menu system we have in WordPress core today. This effectively killed of the premium service I was offering, and made my original plugin redundant. I kept the original “Ryans Suckerfish WordPress plugin” around as a simple Suckerfish implementation. It doesn’t do much, but it is still archived there on the WordPress plugin for anyone who wants to support an ancient dead browser which should no longer be supported.

This little piece of code is what kick started a decade of code writing for me. Hopefully there will be many decades more to come 🙂 Thanks a million to all those who supported me during this crazy journey.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/ryans-suckerfish-wordpress-dropdown-menu/