Making a quick plugin tweak proved to be more challenging than expected. For starters, though it was documented in English, the Automatic Reference Plugin was coded in Spanish! As a testament to the author’s coding skills, that was actually the least of my worries. Good code is readable code, even if the variables are in another language.
Instead, lesser pitfalls drug out the exercise: changes not being actually uploaded, and another plugin parsing the same text before I got to it. Compared to those problems, Spanish variables and regular expressions were easy! I did discover a handy way to debug plugins on a live site, though: activate debugging using conditionals comparing the post id to that of a test draft.
The finished feature, minor for all this effort, creates links other blog posts using words other than their full title using [title|full title of entry].
