Thanks to the hard work of Nima Yousefi, Will Carlough and Andy Maloney, we have a Scrippets plugin that seems to be working pretty reliably. It’s installed at this site now, and we’ll be seeding it out to a few other screenwriting-oriented websites over the next few days to make sure it plays well with others.
Like most programming projects, getting to 90% was easy. Within hours after my original call to coders, there were three plugins that could get the job done.
That last 10% was tricky, however, because it meant looking for situations that would fail: different WordPress themes, competing plugins, and unexpected user input. For example, my original Ruby code couldn’t distinguish between an all-caps slugline and a character name, and the way I was doing it, it would have been very hard to add that capability. ((The final plugin by Nima Yousefi uses regular expressions.))
In terms of plugins, Markdown is the devil. Rarely have I loved and loathed something so thoroughly. Almost any time you’d see a scrippet break in the middle, it was because of Markdown.
While I think the plug-in is working well, I suspect there will be a few more iterations before we let it out into the wild. So test it out in the comments. As a reminder, the syntax is…
[scrippet]
EXT. HOUSE – DAY
Max is checking his mail when he spots neighbor FRANK crossing the street, heading his way.
Shaking his head…
MAX
I thought we talked about this, Frank.
FRANK
(drunk)
I was born naked and I’m not changing now.
[/scrippet]
which becomes…
EXT. HOUSE – DAY
Max is checking his mail when he spots neighbor FRANK crossing the street, heading his way.
Shaking his head...
MAX
I thought we talked about this, Frank.
FRANK
(drunk)
I was born naked and I’m not changing now.