WordPress Plugin : Random Words

Random Words is another completely futile plugin which aims to bring entropy and randomness into your pages and even posts.

Ever got bored by comment pages with the same "Joe said", "Jim said" all page long ? Wouldn't it be funnier and more attractive if it printed something randomly from "thought", "wrote", "said" and "commented" ? Here we are.

Random Words is a WordPress Plugin allowing you to manage a number of lists with any items, and display random items from these lists. Everything is managed from within the Admin interface of your blog, in a very neat interface. It stores its data in two fields of WordPress' built-in Options table, and displays random entries at no cost (no extra SQL query used to fetch items)

Get it

Activate it, go the options page and follow the instructions.

Use it

Use the following syntax :

• In .php documents :
  <?php wp_ozh_randomwords('name_of_list') ?>
  If you want the result returned but not echoed, add a second parameter with value zero :
  <?php $test = wp_ozh_randomwords('name_of_list', 0) ?>

• In Posts or Pages :
  [random:name_of_list]

I don't see any reasonable use for this in posts, but well, I had to do it :)

Watch it

For example, I created a list named "you_are" with the following entries :

In this page I wrote :

The result is (reload to see it change) :
I see, I see … that you are [random:you_are]

Keep list names short and avoid funky characters, but use anything including HTML in the entries. It has to be one-liners, but you can insert a manual <br/>

Push it

A few suggestions, or examples of use (name of the list, followed by items of the list)

You could also use it as a Quote of the Second script : create a list named "quotes" and add entries like :

Tell me

Got a suggestion, a bug report, something to tell, to thank or to complain about ? Using this plugin on your blog ? Made something fun with it ? Tell me !