Learning the World

Marketing Pilgrim’s posted their list of the most useful plugins for new bloggers. Of the plugins on this list, I can personally recommend Akismet; no blog should launch with out it. A lot of my friends in the hobby game blogosphere use CommentLuv. I’ve taken advantage of it while posting comments, but have never installed it on one of my own blogs.

I’ve had great luck using NextGEN Gallery in my WordPress MU pilot install at work, but we have run into a few MU-specific hiccups with the flash file uploader and the location of the file image rotater. This led me to suggest some site-wide configuration options for the plugin in the WordPress support forums:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/251863?replies=1

Here’s what I suggested:

The Default Image Rotator location

The plugin attempts to guess the default location for the imagerotator.swf file based on the assumption that the plugin is installed as part of a standard WordPress installation. This makes the path something like:

http://www.example.com/username/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/imagerotator.swf

Unfortunately, in a WordPress MU install, the plugin is not located in the user’s directory; instead it’s in the main plugins directory. e.g.:

http://www.example.com/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/imagerotator.swf

It’d be great to have a global option that allows me to specify what the default path should be for all of the NextGEN galleries on the WordPress MU install.

Global “Disable Flash Uploader” option

The Flash uploader has been problematic on and off for a while. While 2.7 got it working on non-secure sites, there’s a known issue with Flash and https that prevents it from working in sites secured with https.

NextGEN allows users to disable the Flash uploader on a per-site basis, which is helpful, but I’d love a global option that would allow me to disable the Flash uploader site-wide.

If these options sound helpful to you, please drop by the forums and add your voice to the conversation.

After talking with a faculty member and brainstorming how classes might use WordPress MU, one of the must-have tools we’ve decided we need is an author list. While we anticipate that we’ll have a number of one-person blogs if/when WordPress Mu is in production, there will also be goodly amount of multi-author blogs for classes, student organizations, etc.

We identified two needs:

• Hyperlink an author’s name to a page with all of their posts on the site.
• Include a widget listing all of the authors (with links to their individual posts)

After doing some research this morning, I’ve come up with a few solutions.

1. Linking to author names & listing authors through WP functions: The “Author Templates” page of the WordPress Codex lists a number of useful functions that can be used as part of the Loop to link to individual author pages as well as displaying post counts and author lists. 
   • The specific function is “the_author_posts_link()”, and it inserts the author’s name with a hyperlink to his/her “author” page, which lists everything they’ve written.
   • You can also use “wp_list_authors()” to list all the authors associated with the blog.
   • These options require you to modify the theme’s template file(s). 
2. Listing Authors with the Authors Widget: “Authors Widget” allows you to add a sidebar widget that lists all of the authors associated with the blog with links to their individual author pages (there’s also an optional link for their RSS feeds).

We’re gearing up for a WordPress Mu pilot at the college, and I’m feverishly researching plugins to use with it. Here are the big three I found:

• PodPress: The godfather of podcast plugins. It hasn’t been updated in a while, and there have been mixed reports about how well version 8.8 works with WordPress 2.7. A new version 9 is apparently in the works, but no one knows if/when it will appear. The file upload interface is a bit clunky, but there are a huge number of backend-options, plus stat tracking.
• Podcasting: A simple plugin that requires you know the URL of the file you want to podcast. That’s fine for tech-savvy people, but I think it’s going to fail the “quick and easy” test for everyone else.
• Blubrry: The lead contender. It works with the regular file upload interface for WordPress; if you insert a file into a post using the regular interface, it adds an MP3 player to the post. It also has a nice selection of backend feed options.

I still need to experiment with how these different plugins handle video files (so far, Blubrry worked like a charm), and I’m continuing to look at other options. I’d love to get some feedback on how well these different plugins work, as well as recommends for plugins not on the list