About this WP installation

(this is partly for myself to keep track of teh shiny as I install it)

Installed Plugins

  • Akismet
  • Not activated – antispam. If I get spam, I know I’ll need it.

  • OpenID
  • Allowing users to register and comment with their OpenID

  • Subscribe to Comments
  • Need to test whether this is necessary – allowing users to have comments e-mailed to them. This might be part of WPs functionality – deactivated until I know more.

  • Table of Content Creator
  • Not just creates a nifty TOC, it has a fair amount of options. The really cool thing about it is that – using the <!– toc-creator @blog_include=8 –> syntax you can create separate TOCs for separate categories. (You can exclude or include and otherwise customise this greatly). Thus, there are now pages listing Wiki, Virtual Zoo, and Resources posts only.

  • WP-TOC
  • Adds a menu with variable depth to the page – place ‘toc’ in square brackets whereever you want to see the menu.

  • Syntax Highlighter
  • Not entirely happy with this yet and might try out alternatives – I needed a way to post code, and this allows me to put it between ‘objc’ shortcodes, which is nice and uncomplicated.

  • Custom Post Type
  • Allows the creation of custom post types and custom taxonomies. Haven’t quite worked out how to use it to my best advantage, but this is cool stuff. And yes, I could hack the theme… and remember to change things every time I change my theme. The plugin is vastly superior, and it’s good programming practice.
    Unfortunately, while it seems to create custom types, I’m having slight difficulties in making them appear. This needs a lot of investigating, and providing a video – while I’m either on a slow connection *or* a fast connection where I can’t listen to sound – DOES NOT HELP.

    Plugins under consideration

  • Pagination
  • I’ll roadtest WPs pagination feature (see below) before I look for a dedicated plugin.

  • Image Formatter
  • Either I find a plugin that I really like or I’ll need to add an appropriate definition my my stylesheet once I’ve decided how to handle this – but there will be screenshots, and thus there will need to be image formatting so they flow well.

  • Category Icons
  • One thing I love about LJ/DW is the use of icons to complement the text. I’m investigating ways of adding icons to WP posts in order to make it easier for users to recognise what type of post they’re facing.

Not plugins, but useful

  • <!--more Place your cut text here-->

    That should make the front page of the post a little easier to understand, particularly if you can place the toc ahead of it.

  • <!--nextpage-->

    breaking up a long post into several pages.

  • turning off post revisions
    Add

    define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

    to the wp_config.php file. Ok, I will probably create most posts offline, but the idea of storing three or four or ten revisions of each post in the database is pretty scary – and posts *will* be edited to include more links etc.
    Revisions have a major bug: if you edit the short title (‘slug’) of a post, it gets frozen in time. Point your browser to the slug, and you get served that page as it used to be, including the list of pages as it used to be then… and there’s no way of editing them short of purging the database of old revisions. Doubleplus ungood.

  • Edit Quicktags in the HTML editor.

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