New Support Page

July 11th:

Major updates are on the horizon for this plugin, due out August 1st. The new update of the plugin will only bring it up to version 0.6 of the plugin, still not considered a full release version and therefore still in beta. These changes will affect the way shortcodes are to be properly entered into a post and the previous method will be rendered inoperable. This is unavoidable, as the first generation of the plugin suffered from some endemic failures of logic (I goofed, in other words!).

In addition to the new version of the plugin, an entirely new version of the documentation will also be required. The new documentation will live in a Page, rather than in the current post, for this reason.

WP-Tabbity provides WordPress blog authors with the ability to leverage the jQuery UI to create an unlimited number of tab groups containing an unlimited number of tabs in any post or page. The plugin uses WordPress’s core shortcode lexicon and the included version of the jQuery libraries to allow quick, easy and versatile use of tabs anywhere on the site.

Additional Information

71 comments so far (is that a lot?)

For those who are serious about cataloging and displaying news from across the Internet in one blog, I’ve created the DFE News Harvester Plugin. DFENH allows you to register a variety of news feeds, read them within WordPress, select the articles you’d like to publish and publish them as posts in a blog.

DFENH also works with WP meta data to provide a number of bits of data that you might want in a news article, such as a title, a secondary “teaser” title, an image with credit and a brief summary. It’s up to you how you want to actually use this metadata on your site: DFENH does not offer any method of displaying metadata on the site.

Another feature of DFE News Harvester is it’s ability to automatically create tags for each article based on it’s title. When a list of articles is submitted for publication, DFENH automatically breaks the title up by words, eliminates unnecessary words like “by, the, if, etc” and creates tags for each of the remaining keywords.

This is a plugin which will work in either WordPress or WordPress MU. However, this is not a plugin meant to run in the /mu-plugins folder and I have not tested it for that use.

To install, simply download from WordPress.org, drop the entire /dfe_news_harvester folder into your wp-content/plugins folder and activate through the Control Panel of your blog.

Is This a Splog Plugin?

You can use this plugin however you like, but I would submit that there are far more efficient methods of creating a splog than this plugin provides. This plugin is geared towards providing updated news content in a way that is administration-heavy, relative to splogging tools. It does not harvest content off the original website by itself, it does provide a method of renaming links and providing your own summary of articles.

I trust that everyone who uses this plugin does so with the utter-most respect for original content on the web!

Download this plugin

14 comments so far (is that a lot?)

This plugin is deprecated and no longer maintained by the developer.

The new 2.7 version of WordPress MU is pretty awesome and I’m glad to have it running on both of my sites right now. There’s a lot 2.7 has to offer in terms of usability boosts, and while I balked at the redesign when it first started, I have to confess that there is much to love about the new layout.

However, one thing that’s been nagging me is the new Admin Bar functionality. It suffers from two things, in my opinion:

1. It’s a blog by blog setting, not sitewide. This is fine for sites where you want savvy people to start blogging on your network. It’s less so for community based sites like mine, where the idea is a sort of news magazine site where consistency is key.
2. Because plugins can add their own top-level menus, the Admin Bar can get a bit crowded and I’d like the option to add or subtract items from the list as I see fit. Again, it would be nice to have these settings happen globally rather than by site.

While I have not worked out the second problem just yet, I thought I’d go ahead and post my modified code to this site which allows site-wide settings rather than by-site. It also tucks the Admin Bar settings under the Admin section rather than Options.

There’s nothing magical here: all I did was change every occurrence of “get_option” and “update_option” to “get_site_option” and “update_site_option.” Then, I just modified the menu statement to look like the following:
// Register the settings page
function AddAdminMenu() {
add_submenu_page('wpmu-admin.php', __('WordPress Admin Bar', 'wordpress-admin-bar'), __('Admin Bar', 'wordpress-admin-bar'), 'read', 'wordpress-admin-bar', array(&$this, 'SettingsPage') );
}

Download the file here and replace the one currently sitting in /wp-includes/wordpress-admin-bar/

Meanwhile, I’m going to work on tweaking the plugin to make it more flexible for MU as I go.

9 comments so far (is that a lot?)

Updated to Version 3.0! New Support Page

Titles to Tags is now fully-functional with WordPress 3.0!

I’ve finally found time to wrap by brain around how Tortoise SVN works – which means understanding SVN in the first place, then figuring out how Tortoise’s GUI works – and I’ve updated the plugin after many moons of inactivity. Updates include some revamping of the code based on my experiments with it in another plugin, improved documentation in the plugin itself and bug fixes including the phantom tags commenters have reported.

Download Plugin

Never forget to post your tags again! With the Titles to Tags plugin, WordPress will scan your post’s title for the most keyword-appropriate words and add them to your tags list automatically on save! The plugin comes with a very long list of words which are statistically irrelevant, such as “I” or “among,” which don’t make good keywords. You can also edit this list to include more or less terms by going to Options > Titles 2 Tags. There is also an option to revert to the original list, but watch out! You will lose your edited list forever if you do this!

This plugin will only save tags to your posts if none exist already. The presumption is that if you’ve already saved tags, you must know what you want and anyway, you might have removed some tags Titles to Tags added because you don’t like them. The function runs every time you save a post, either by publishing, saving or editing the post.

To install the plugin, simply download it from the WordPress Plugin Repository, then extract both the hn_titles_to_tags.php file and then hn_t2t and it’s contents into your /plugins folder. Activate the plugin by going to Plugins, and begin posting as normal.

WordPress MU Developers: Note that, if your creating a community-based website built on MU – and your users aren’t being diligent about adding tags – this is a great way to get those tags created painlessly! You can place the file and it’s companion directory in the /mu-plugins file and each blog will get it’s own editable list of ignored words.

And hey! If you like this plugin, I would really appreciate it if you went back to the WordPress.org page and rated it! Thanks!

39 comments so far (is that a lot?)

This plugin no longer supported by the developer.

Download Here

The WPMU Site-Wide Latest plugin provides two widgets for your site. The first, labeled “Newest Post,” creates an 80-word teaser of the single most recently published blog post on any public blog across the entire site. The second, called “Recent Posts,” creates a list of the most recently updated blogs with their most recent posts, one post per blog. Both plugins provide a vehicle for those using the standard Gravatar plugin to obtain and display the Gravatar of the post author in each case.

The teaser widget takes the post title as the title of the widget, whereas the listing widget allows you to set your own title. Both allow you to ignore blogs, if you wish. The list widget also allows you to specify how many blogs you want to display and an offset. This is in case you use both together, that way the most recent comment is in the “Newest Post” widget and the next most recent begins the list in the “Recent Posts” widget.

The plugin also uses the WP-Cache, and both widgets allow you to set a time-out.

WP-Functions Used in This Plugin:

switch_to_blog()
restore_blog()
wp_cache_set()
wp_cache_get()
get_permalink()

Installation:

Unzip, upload (to either /mu-plugins or /plugins, your preference), activate and configure. Simple as that!

4 comments so far (is that a lot?)