{"slug": "i-built-a-wordpress-plugin-nobody-asked-for-here-s-why-and-how", "title": "I Built a WordPress Plugin Nobody Asked For. Here's Why –. and How", "summary": "WordPress developer Amr Elnagdy built OGify, a plugin that automatically generates social preview images for blog posts, after identifying the manual creation of featured images as a source of friction. The plugin, developed using AI agent skills, is now open-source on GitHub and submitted to the WordPress plugin directory. Elnagdy argues that AI has collapsed the cost of building small tools, enabling solo developers to quickly solve personal pain points.", "body_md": "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.\n\nThat thirty-minute task is friction. And friction is what killed blogging for me the first time.\n\n## The blog I sold\n\nBack 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.\n\nAfter 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.\n\nSo 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.\n\n## The plugin nobody asked for\n\nEvery 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.\n\nOGify 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.\n\nThat is the whole plugin. It does one small thing so I never think about it again. Nobody asked for it. I needed it.\n\nIt lives on [GitHub](https://github.com/amElnagdy/ogify) 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.\n\n## The part that would not have happened two years ago\n\nHere 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:\n\n-\n[Agent Skills for WordPress](https://github.com/wordPress/agent-skills)which has a dedicatedskill that teaches the AI how a proper plugin is structured.`wp-plugin-development`\n\n[WP Guard skill](https://github.com/amElnagdy/guard-skills), 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.\n\nThis 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\n## What this blog is\n\nNotes 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.\n\nI 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.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-a-wordpress-plugin-nobody-asked-for-here-s-why-and-how", "canonical_source": "https://notes.nagdy.me/2026/07/built-wordpress-plugin-nobody-asked-for-heres-why-and-how/", "published_at": "2026-07-12 07:57:04+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-12 08:35:27.127797+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "developer-tools", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Amr Elnagdy", "OGify", "WordPress", "GitHub", "Agent Skills for WordPress", "WP Guard skill"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-a-wordpress-plugin-nobody-asked-for-here-s-why-and-how", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-a-wordpress-plugin-nobody-asked-for-here-s-why-and-how.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-a-wordpress-plugin-nobody-asked-for-here-s-why-and-how.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-a-wordpress-plugin-nobody-asked-for-here-s-why-and-how.jsonld"}}