I don't have reST support on the site where my NewsBruiser installation lives (and I don't particularly like reST anyway), so I decided to write a plugin that does the only thing I really need when writing entries: converting two consecutive linefeeds to a <p> tag. (Two consecutive linefeeds is, of course, the Universal Paragraph Separator; so much that even in applications where you don't need to type two consecutive linefeeds to start a paragraph, you do it anyhow.)

The only challenging thing writing the plugin was that my ISP doesn't provide a decent programming environment — I don't have command line Python or Python mode for Emacs there. Otherwise, writing the plugin, with all its warts and bugs, took about 15 minutes, including the "I Want Options" based option to NewsBruiser configuration.

So I propose a NewsBruiser Plugin Development slogan:

NewsBruiser Plugin Development — so easy that a child can do it (see the picture below)

(To be honest, though, Telma was IRCing at the moment..)

Here's the tgz package of the plugin: AutomaticParagraphs-1e-13.tgz. Extract it to your NewsBruiser base directory (it creates a directory nb/plugin/entry/filter/paragraph/) and configure it on the Entries tab in the NewsBruiser configuration.