Meshio.com

Thanks to Microscopic Earthling (his real name is Sourjya), you can now convert any currency in the world just by using a little widget that is available here at the Meshio.com’s sidebar- it’s located under the header “Currency Converter”.

The plugin is called curreX.

Besides doing a good job with the currency translation part, this plugin is very well supported by the developer himself. He has been very persistent and patient in helping me to fix a few minor bugs. And with such a handy tool, I decided to ask the creator himself about his plugin.

The following is an exclusive email interview with the man behind the codes.

Yow Chuan (YC) : Where are you based, and what do you do professionally?

Sourjya (SJ) : I’m originally from India but have been settled in Thailand for almost 7 years now. My primary work involves mainstream software development (Windows based) on the .NET platform as well as PHP-based web-applications.

YC : Why did you chose to create this currency converter plugin? I mean, there are so many plugins that you could have coded, why a currency converter?

SJ : curreX was the by-product of one of my first CMS coding projects. I was designing a site for a property investment site in Thailand. The site-owner wanted a mechanism by which the listed property price could be converted to any given world currency.

I was teaching myself Ajax at that point of time – so I thought, why not try to make it the same way and come up with something snazzy.

The first version was extremely crude and consisted of just a single dropdown box for the destination currency – though that’s what the requirement was, since the amount and source currency were both pre-listed.

I had started blogging around the same time and had fallen in love with WordPress right away. What caught my fancy was it’s plug-in architecture and immense extensibility. Seeing so many cool plug-ins out there made me want to create one of my own.

But I really lacked in the “idea” department. It seemed like the other plug-in authors had almost every angle covered!! Then suddenly it struck me that I had something ready at hand that can be easily converted to a cool plug-in. And curreX was born.

YC : Anyone helped you to develop curreX? Did you have a team to help you out, you know, like a beta-tester, a designer etc?

SJ : Nope! None at all – except for hundreds of Ajax tutorials on the net from where I borrowed ideas and stitched them together. I had passive help from one quarter though. There was a plug-in similar to curreX for Mambo / Joomla – developed by Norbert Feria. Thanks to him for setting me off in the right direction. However, it was a much simpler plug-in and didn’t employ Ajax. I used the currency conversion back-end from that plug-in and modified it to suit my needs.

YC : Why did you choose to use the Yahoo! API? Have you compared it with other currency exchange APIs?

SJ : The choice came naturally with Norbert Feria’s plug-in. It was already using the Yahoo! API – so I just played along. I wouldn’t really call it an API though. The exchange rates are available as freely downloadable plain-text CSV files from the Yahoo! Finance site. curreX connects to this page, provides the correct parameters (srouce and destination currencies), downloads the CSV file and extracts the exchange rate from it.

In a way this was much simpler than signing-up for other APIs and learning their syntax all over again. So I decided to stick to this.

YC : Who do you think should use this plugin? What is the target industry that you hope this plugin will be able to cater to?

SJ : Anyone running a financial blog should benefit from this plug-in. Other than that any site that is selling products or services online to a worldwide client base can take help of this – albeit with minor modifications and customizations.

YC : Do you know how many people is using curreX at this moment? Are you using any type of tracking mechanism to check your fanbase?

SJ : This is something I’ve always been very keen on knowing – but it’s hard to figure out with the present system. I can only make a rough estimate from the comments and my server logs.

I plan to include some sort of tracking mechanism in future, which will inform me when the plug-in is activated and/or deactivated. I can get a pretty accurate figure for that. I don’t want to implement any real-time tracking system as this will only help to slow down the plug-in.

YC : Since this plugin is so handy, will you consider charging for it?

SJ : Nope. Never. This was released free and open source and that’s how it will always be.

YC : Last but not least, what are you future plans for curreX?

SJ : At the moment I’m totally out of ideas of my own. There were a couple of suggestions left in comments by various people using curreX. I plan to follow-up on them and implement whichever is possible. If you get any bright sparks, do let me know :)

Apart from that, I’ve released a flash-version too for those who’re facing consistent problems with the HTML/Ajax version. I intend to refine it further (skinnable interface maybe).

CurreX is now available in plain HTML or Flash-based flavors. Initially, it was only meant for widget-based Wordpress themes, but after constant bugging from non-widget Wordpress users like me, Sourjya has managed to customised his plugin to work with non-widget-based themes.

Installation is a breeze, and if you encounter any issues during installation, you can always email Sourjya and notify him on the bug. But be sure to check out the comment section of the plugin page and the curreX support forum before shooting him with your bug report.

By the way, this is not a “paid review”. I truly recommend you to give this neat plugin a try, especially if your industry is finance or travel related.

Again, I would like to thank Sourjya for taking his time for the email interview and also for the great plugin!

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