Gloss

WordPress sites are living things — content people read, share, and depend on. All three of these plugins grew out of a specific annoyance on a real site, and all three follow the same rule: be useful, be careful, then get out of the way. Together they taught me the most transferable habit of anything I've built — preview before acting.

What it is

Extreme Text Replacer finds an exact string — a phrase, a fragment of markup, a leftover block marker — and replaces it across published posts, all of them or one chosen category. A dry run shows exactly what would change, before anything does. Translation Glossary attaches glossaries to categories and gives specialized terms a hover explanation at their first mention in a post. Placeholder Translations lets one block template show different text per language, without touching the stored content.

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What it taught me

• Dry-run first. Previewing a destructive operation — how many matches, in which posts, with counts — turned out to be the single most important design decision. Show the consequences before causing them.
• Guardrails earn their keep the hard way. When a search pattern could disturb the layout, the replacer stops and asks. It feels fussy until the day it prevents a disaster.
• Presentation and content deserve separation. The placeholder plugin rewrites nothing — the same stored block simply renders in the reader's language.
• Context is editorial. The glossary highlights each term only once, only where it's relevant, and never inside markup.
• Building for strangers leaves a mark. Version requirements, translations, licensing, documentation — the moment software leaves my own site, it has to explain itself.

Where it stands

Three tools built to be installed once and forgotten — which, for this kind of plugin, is the highest compliment.