I published a few articles back in early 2005 and late 2006 explaining how you can edit your WordPress quicktags.js JavaScript file to add new buttons to your Edit Post menu. At the time this was the simplest way I knew to change the WordPress interface. Since then, however, every time a new version of WordPress has been released, I’ve been forced to make all the changes again because quicktags.js is one of the internal files that you’re not technically supposed to be editing.

Amazon QuickTagsI (finally) spent a couple of hours a few weeks ago and built a WordPress Plugin to handle this for me. I also went through the required steps — including researching enough about SubVersion to get the job done — to publish my plugin to the WordPress Plugins database. That means that now you, too, can add this functionality to your blog.

The most difficult part of writing the plugin was determining how to modify the Edit Post menu in both the WYSIWYG / TinyMCE view and the plain-text / HTML view. Once I was able to do that the rest of it was pretty simple.

In addition to adding two buttons which allow you to quickly generate Amazon affiliate links, this plugin also adds two ‘generic’ buttons — one to create a custom <span> and another to create a custom <div>. You can set a default HTML class to these buttons in the plugin’s settings panel. I have the span set by default to be my “dropcap” class and the div set to be my “pullquote” class, but you can set yours to be anything you want.

2024-02-16: This plugin hasn’t been updated in over a decade and I highly doubt it will still work.
2024-02-16: Broken links in this post have been removed and/or updated.