Featured Community Plugin: Modern Art of the Day
This post is part of a series, featuring the incredible work of plugin authors who grow the TRMNL plugin ecosystem with every contribution. The TRMNL team has individually selected these plugins and authors to be featured.
Modern Art of the Day Plugin
Community member Jasper (Discord: Jasper) created the Art of the Day Collection of plugins; here are their words on how Modern Art of the Day was created.
Why did you want this plugin to exist?
My very first plugin for TRMNL was Art of the Day. The old masters are classics that we mostly only see in a museum and even that doesn't happen regularly. Of course we all (should :)) know the classics like The Nightwatch, Monet's water lilies etc. But there are so many of them. I wanted to showcase a different one every day, and spend quite a lot of them to match them to the seasons and special days - if possible.
I know quite a few classics from the old masters, but my knowledge of newer artworks is lacking a lot. Seeing how many people like the Art of the Day, it made sense to create a modern version. This gives me the opportunity to actually go out and research newer artworks and put them in there.
It must be said that my personal taste plays quite a big part in the curation of these pieces, and the amount of artworks in there is limited. So do me a favor and drop your favorite modern artists on the developer Discord or in my mail so I can keep on extending the collection!
What was your process for creating the plugin?
The plugin has a (private) admin interface to manage the artworks. Focus there is on making it as quick as possible. So drag an image, fill in 2 fields, and that should be it.
The plugin fetches a random image per x period, so not a lot of logic is needed.
The admin tools was vibe coded with Claude. I asked it write it in simple PHP because I can go in and change code if needed.
Is there a tip you would give to a new plugin developer?
If you are not that handy with frontend development/liquid, use an llm. Feed it the trmnl docs and ask away. Most ideas can be generated quite quickly by asking what you want!
What is your favorite plugin that someone else created and why?
I love the aesthetics from the Weather Dashboard plugin by Bas. Such a cool flashback to the retro alarm clocks from way back. Great to see stuff happening that doesn't rely on the TRMNL framework.
