Digging around for plugins to WordPress can be a daunting task. WordPress is great in that respect, however. With plugins for everything you can possibly imagine, multiples of them, in fact, it can be hard to pinpoint the exact one you want. Typically, in situations like that, I usually just fallback to whatever is popular. Like is the case with a plugin for creating contact forms.
But when I started looking around for a plugin to display deck builds and individual cards for Magic: the Gathering… I found my options to be extremely slim. If I recall, my search for “MTG” only turned up like 5 results.
Being familiar with the Deckbox.org site already and the great work the dev over there does, I decided to try out his deckbox plugin. It does a lot of great things, and probably more yet that I’ve simply not discovered. There are some things I wish it could do that it doesn’t.
This lead me down my next rabbit hole. WordPress Plugin development.
Wanting more functionality in an MTG plugin, I set out to do some research. Mind you, I left my desire to learn PHP, way back when I decided I wasn’t going to use WordPress…. years and years ago. It really is a good thing that so many coding and scripting languages are very similar… for the most part… and “if” statement is an “if” statement… no matter what language were talking. So… I’ve been brushing up on my PHP…
At first, I figured I’d attempt to use MTGJSON in my plugin, to pull Magic card info… but unless I’m mistaken… it seems there is no images of the cards available. Going that route, I’d need to find all the images to use… and space to store them. I then discovered that Scryfall, a Magic search engine, has an api, and a database of images to pull from. So… It’s looking like Scryfall is probably going to be the way to go. And their API documentation is much more comprehensive than whats available on MTGJSON. But both have their strengths and weaknesses.
And so… that seems to be my current drive… I’ve not totally committed to making a new MTG Toolkit of some kind for WordPress… but.. It’s definitely a possibility. We’ll see what the future brings.