I Built a WordPress Plugin Nobody Asked For. Here's Why .. and How " Notes by Nagdy

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I Built a WordPress Plugin Nobody Asked For. Here’s Why .. and How

Nagdy

Jul 11, 2026

You finish writing a post. You are happy with it. You hit publish, share it on Linkedin, and the preview shows up as a gray box with no images. So you open a design tool, spend 30 minutes making a featured image you don’t care about, and promise yourself next time will be different.

That thirty-minute task is friction. And friction is what killed blogging for me the first time.

The blog I sold

Back in 2018 I had a WordPress blog. I loved it. I wrote about WordPress itself, and it did well enough that someone paid 6000 euros for it which at the time felt like a fortune to me.

After that I moved to YouTube. I built NagdyWP, an Arabic channel about WordPress, WooCommerce, and lately AI. Video is great and I’m not leaving it. But I never stopped missing writing. There’s a kind of thinking that only happens when you write things down, and I wanted it back.

So here we are. And true to form, before writing a single post, I got distracted by a piece of friction and built a plugin instead.

The plugin nobody asked for

Every post needs a featured image. Not because the post needs it, but because the social preview does. Skip it and your link looks broken or use a plugin that sets one image for all of your posts. Make it manually and you list time on every single post, doing design work that follows the same template anyway.

OGify removes that step. It generates the OG image for a post automatically on publish. It pulls the title, calculate the reading time, pulls your gravatar or custom uploaded avatar and creates a real image in a nice design.

What OGify created for this post

That is the whole plugin. It does one small thing so I never think about it again. Nobody asked for it. I needed it.

It lives on GitHub today, and it is submitted to the WordPress.org plugin directory, currently waiting in the review queue. When it goes live there I will update this post.

The part that would not have happened two years ago

Here is the honest bit, I did not hand-write most of OGify. I built it, of course, with AI, using agent skills. Two of them did the heavy lifting:

Agent Skills for WordPress which has a dedicated wp-plugin-development skill that teaches the AI how a proper plugin is structured.

WP Guard skill, a skill I wrote myself, which keeps the generated code inside WordPress security and coding standards instead of whatever the model feels like that day.

This is the real story, and it is bigger than one small plugin. The cost of scratching your own itch has collapsed. A one-person fix that used to be a weekend of work is now an evening. That changes what is worth building.

The full teardown of how I built it, including the skills I used and what the AI got wrong along the way, is the next post.

What this blog is

Notes by Nagdy is a notebook, not a magazine. I write in plain English about building software, working with AI, and shipping things people use. A lot of it will live in the WordPress and WooCommerce world, because that is my home turf, but not all of it.

I publish when something is worth keeping, not on a schedule. If that sounds like your kind of reading, stick around. The next post has code in it.

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